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From the topless bathers on the French Riviera to the prostitutes in the windows of red-light districts in Hamburg and Amsterdam, Europeans have long demonstrated a more open approach to nudity than Americans. Could Apple's revolutionary iPad change even that? The daily topless "Bild girl" still smiles on the front page of Germany's best-selling Bild newspaper, and titillating images adorn the pages of weekly magazines such as Germany's Stern and Spiegel. European publishers have tried to take the "sex sells" formula for print success into the world of digital media apps. Steve Jobs holds the iPad Ryan Anson, AFP / Getty Images Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs holds the iPad in January. Apple has rules against nudity in apps for the device. Just don't do it on the iPad, says Steve Jobs. From German publishers' point of view, the Apple founder has morphed into a digital Ayatollah and is banning nudity -- from outright porn to photos of renegade nipples on the catwalks of Milan -- anywhere in the emerging new media world based on Apple's iPad tablet computer. Recently, Apple's cyber police removed Stern's gallery of nude photos and forced Bild to put some clothes on the "Bild girl." "Today they censor nipples, tomorrow it's editorial content," said a spokeswoman at Bild. Stern.de, the Web site of the German weekly magazine, has now installed what its CEO Chris Hasselbring calls an "erotic filter" to ensure that no content in violation of Apple's rules makes it onto the Stern app for the iPhone or iPad. But Hasselbring and other German publishers are not happy with the situation. "Apple has changed its business model to become a content provider but it doesn't understand what responsibility that new role carries," says Hasselbring. "A publisher must respect freedom of the press and they should not be the ones to decide which content is delivered to the consumer." The global magazine publishing industry greeted the launch of the iPad earlier this year with a sigh of relief, celebrating Jobs as the savior of the beleaguered industry. "The iPad has launched a new era in publishing," Mathias Doepfner, the CEO of Axel Springer Verlag, which publishes the Bild newspaper, said on the Charlie Rose show last month. "Every publisher should thank Steve Jobs every day." They might not be thanking him for long. Jobs' blitzkrieg against German nudity on his iPad could have far-reaching consequences for the publishing industry if he is allowed to dictate what content is allowed and what should be verboten. Writing in the New Yorker recently, media journalist Ken Auletta examined the long-term aims of Jobs, his arch-nemesis Jeff Bezos -- the Amazon founder and developer of the Kindle -- and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Auletta suggests that Jobs and Bezos want their devices and associated services to supplant the publishing industry as we now know it. Google has also taken a step in this direction with its massive digital library. Those developments could leave several big players out for a lock on distribution with substantial power over content, too. That is the more significant issue at stake behind Jobs' decision to nix the German nipples from Apple's app store: Is it good for a company like Apple to have so much power over determining what is good for the rest of us? Consumers are already voicing protest at censorship of content and intervention rights of some site operators. The BBC reported this week that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales relinquished some of his site privileges after Wikipedia users complained that he deleted images from the site without first consulting users. In early April, Larry Sanger, the estranged Wikipedia co-founder, filed a complaint with the FBI that Wikipedia Commons was "knowingly distributing child pornography." The complaint prompted Wikipedia Commons to delete hundreds of images. The problem is that the censor robots at sites like Wikipedia or on the iPad still have a hard time telling whether a nude image is porn, harmless titillation, or an image with educational benefit for medical students, for example. For just that reason, Wikipedia had to go back and reinstall many of the images that it first took down and later determined were not porn after all. In the Book of Jobs, though, there seems to be no gray area. In an e-mail allegedly from Jobs that was published on the TechCrunch blog, Jobs dismissed his critics, saying: "We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone." And for now, apparently, that includes the Bild girl.