Bridging the Copyright Gap: Do Large Vision-Language Models Recognize and Respect Copyrighted Content?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Naen, Zhang, Jinghuai, Li, Changjiang, An, Hengyu, Zhou, Chunyi, Wang, Jun, Xu, Boyu, Li, Yuyuan, Du, Tianyu, Ji, Shouling
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Naen
Zhang, Jinghuai
Li, Changjiang
An, Hengyu
Zhou, Chunyi
Wang, Jun
Xu, Boyu
Li, Yuyuan
Du, Tianyu
Ji, Shouling
author_facet Xu, Naen
Zhang, Jinghuai
Li, Changjiang
An, Hengyu
Zhou, Chunyi
Wang, Jun
Xu, Boyu
Li, Yuyuan
Du, Tianyu
Ji, Shouling
contents Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in multimodal reasoning tasks. However, their widespread accessibility raises critical concerns about potential copyright infringement. Will LVLMs accurately recognize and comply with copyright regulations when encountering copyrighted content (i.e., user input, retrieved documents) in the context? Failure to comply with copyright regulations may lead to serious legal and ethical consequences, particularly when LVLMs generate responses based on copyrighted materials (e.g., retrieved book experts, news reports). In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of various LVLMs, examining how they handle copyrighted content -- such as book excerpts, news articles, music lyrics, and code documentation when they are presented as visual inputs. To systematically measure copyright compliance, we introduce a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising 50,000 multimodal query-content pairs designed to evaluate how effectively LVLMs handle queries that could lead to copyright infringement. Given that real-world copyrighted content may or may not include a copyright notice, the dataset includes query-content pairs in two distinct scenarios: with and without a copyright notice. For the former, we extensively cover four types of copyright notices to account for different cases. Our evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art closed-source LVLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in recognizing and respecting the copyrighted content, even when presented with the copyright notice. To solve this limitation, we introduce a novel tool-augmented defense framework for copyright compliance, which reduces infringement risks in all scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of developing copyright-aware LVLMs to ensure the responsible and lawful use of copyrighted content.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_21871
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging the Copyright Gap: Do Large Vision-Language Models Recognize and Respect Copyrighted Content?
Xu, Naen
Zhang, Jinghuai
Li, Changjiang
An, Hengyu
Zhou, Chunyi
Wang, Jun
Xu, Boyu
Li, Yuyuan
Du, Tianyu
Ji, Shouling
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Computers and Society
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in multimodal reasoning tasks. However, their widespread accessibility raises critical concerns about potential copyright infringement. Will LVLMs accurately recognize and comply with copyright regulations when encountering copyrighted content (i.e., user input, retrieved documents) in the context? Failure to comply with copyright regulations may lead to serious legal and ethical consequences, particularly when LVLMs generate responses based on copyrighted materials (e.g., retrieved book experts, news reports). In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of various LVLMs, examining how they handle copyrighted content -- such as book excerpts, news articles, music lyrics, and code documentation when they are presented as visual inputs. To systematically measure copyright compliance, we introduce a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising 50,000 multimodal query-content pairs designed to evaluate how effectively LVLMs handle queries that could lead to copyright infringement. Given that real-world copyrighted content may or may not include a copyright notice, the dataset includes query-content pairs in two distinct scenarios: with and without a copyright notice. For the former, we extensively cover four types of copyright notices to account for different cases. Our evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art closed-source LVLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in recognizing and respecting the copyrighted content, even when presented with the copyright notice. To solve this limitation, we introduce a novel tool-augmented defense framework for copyright compliance, which reduces infringement risks in all scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of developing copyright-aware LVLMs to ensure the responsible and lawful use of copyrighted content.
title Bridging the Copyright Gap: Do Large Vision-Language Models Recognize and Respect Copyrighted Content?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21871