Preamble

Legal Risks and Multi-dimensional Regulatory Paths of AR Publications in the Digital-Intelligence Era

Lu Guixi¹, Wang Zhuang²*
(1. Shandong University, Weihai, Shandong 264209; 2. Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing 100083)

Abstract

[Purpose] AR publications deliver immersive reading experiences by merging virtual and physical realities, yet this "double-edged sword" of new technology introduces numerous legal risks. Against the backdrop of the digital-intelligence era, there is an urgent need to thoroughly analyze these legal risks and explore effective regulatory pathways and strategies. [Method] This study conducts a case analysis of the representative AR publication series Science Runs Out. [Results] The research identifies legal risks in three domains: intellectual property infringement, privacy and data security, and content supervision and compliance review. [Conclusion] The paper proposes targeted regulatory approaches, including technology-empowered intellectual property protection, establishment of collaborative regulatory mechanisms, and adherence to the integration of rigid and flexible measures.

Keywords: digital-intelligence publishing; AR technology; legal risks; regulatory paths
CLC Number: G201
Document Code: A
Article ID: 1671-0134(2025)03-120-04
DOI: 10.19483/j.cnki.11-4653/n.2025.03.026
Citation Format: Lu Guixi, Wang Zhuang. Analysis of Legal Risks and Multi-dimensional Regulatory Paths of AR Publications in the Digital-Intelligence Era[J]. China Media Technology, 2025, 32(3): 120-123.

1. Problem Statement

In recent years, internet technology has fundamentally transformed how people communicate, interact, and share information [1]. With the arrival of the digital-intelligence era, exemplified by artificial intelligence, cutting-edge digital technologies have become a crucial driving force for new-quality productive forces. Humanity has entered an era of sweeping transformation characterized by the widespread application and continuous innovation of AI technology [2], and digitization has become a mandatory challenge across all industries [3]. From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, and now to emerging technologies such as AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality), the metaverse, and generative AI, digital-intelligence technologies have not only revolutionized content production, dissemination, and application, but have also profoundly altered the operational models and business logic of traditional industries. In the publishing sector, these technologies have triggered unprecedented transformation, propelling the industry from print publishing to smart publishing and intelligent publishing. As an innovative and continuously evolving technology, AR is being widely adopted in publishing, gradually permeating various aspects of our lives and generating profound impacts. However, while AR publications drive innovation and development in the publishing industry, they also trigger a series of complex legal risks that have become bottlenecks hindering the deep integration and advancement of the publishing industry, urgently requiring in-depth analysis and effective solutions from government and researchers.

Within the legal system, intellectual property law maintains a special connection with technology and the economy—it is both a product of modern commodity economy and scientific-technological development, and the result of the "dematerialization revolution" of property in private law [4]. Traditional book-related IP disputes typically concentrate on copyright issues, but AR publications contain far more elements than conventional books, creating challenges not only for copyright infringement and protection, but also presenting significant risks regarding patent and trademark rights. In addition to traditional text and images, AR publications incorporate substantial multimedia elements such as audio, video, and 3D models. On one hand, the unique nature of AR publications makes content reproduction and dissemination much easier, posing enormous challenges to copyright protection. Consequently, creators must implement comprehensive copyright protection for their works, requiring确权 (rights confirmation) not only for basic elements like text, images, audio, and video, but also accounting for the special characteristics of AR publications in interactive design and virtual elements. Similar to audiobooks, infringement evidence for AR publications often exists in electronic data form, which can be more easily modified or deleted with minimal trace, significantly increasing the difficulty of evidence preservation and notarization [5]. On the other hand, AR publications contain numerous elements, and whether certain novel composite materials qualify for copyrightability remains controversial. Secondly, the most significant difference between AR publications and traditional books lies in their technological application, and wherever technology is applied, patent risks increase substantially—for instance, unauthorized use of others' patented technologies or infringement of existing patents. In China, patent law protects three types of subjects: invention patents, utility model patents, and design patents. Since AR publication production relies on the synergy of multiple technologies including augmented reality, image processing, audio processing, and video special effects, it involves all aspects of patent protection. This creates difficulties not only in accurately categorizing patent types during application, but also in determining liability for patent infringement. Additionally, although book trademarks are protected under China's Trademark Law, issues such as unclear regulations and disputes regarding book titles and cover designs persist, and the emergence of AR publications has exacerbated these problems while creating new dilemmas such as trademark repeat registration and preemptive registration, as well as trademark monopolies by foreign publishing companies.

2. Three Legal Risks of AR Publications in the Digital-Intelligence Era

2.1 Intellectual Property Risks

AR publications require companion mobile apps for reading, which demand various permissions from users, such as access to contacts, device models, and accounts on other platforms. After obtaining such personal information, platforms may use algorithms to tag users and conduct content push, advertising, and other commercial activities based on these tags. If application security measures are inadequate, some platforms or individuals may even sell collected personal information to third parties for profit, resulting in illegal collection, use, alteration, and leakage of personal information that seriously infringes upon users' rights to know about, choose, and decide how their personal information is processed. Moreover, AR publications represent a relatively new field for data security and risk management. Much data transmission relies on user devices and central servers, creating risks of interception, alteration, or theft that seriously threaten users' data and information security—for example, foreign SDK providers withdrawing technology authorization [6]. Furthermore, AR technology in the AI era updates rapidly, with security vulnerabilities and data risks emerging endlessly. Finding a balance between technological updates and data protection to ensure user data security constitutes another major challenge for AR publications. Beyond these issues, readers still lack awareness regarding privacy and data security protection for AR publications. Since AR publication reading requires operation, users' physical and location information is inevitably recorded by relevant systems. This information includes both data obtained by book designers and developers through privacy terms and permission requests, and information voluntarily input by users themselves—a process in which readers find it difficult to maintain vigilance and privacy protection awareness. China currently lacks clear laws and regulations targeting new infringement methods like AR publications, and under the current legislative approach, parties bear the burden of proof for their claims, meaning that once personal information leakage occurs, readers face significant difficulties in proving damages.

2.3 Content Supervision and Compliance Review Risks

Content supervision and compliance review are crucial for book publishing. The National Press and Publication Administration and other units have issued multiple guidelines on strengthening digital publishing content management. However, as digital transformation deepens, the diverse content forms of AR publications pose greater challenges for supervision. Regulators must address not only traditional text and image content, but also substantial hypermedia content including 3D models, interactive designs, and lighting special effects. Moreover, AR publication content often features real-time updates and dynamic interaction, meaning readers can interact with book content in real time through AR technology, and the content may change based on user interaction. This complexity requires regulators to employ more composite talents with technical capabilities and professional knowledge to effectively supervise AR publication content. Simultaneously, this real-time and dynamic nature makes content supervision more difficult, requiring real-time monitoring to ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations, which causes regulatory costs to surge dramatically. Currently, traditional supervision and review processes focus primarily on content, while the AR publication field has yet to form unified technical standards, leading to compliance challenges for global promotion and affecting the international expansion of Chinese AR publications. The absence of technical standards results in different publishers and enterprises adopting varying technical routes, implementation methods, and compatibility when producing AR publications, creating uncertainty for user experience. To address challenges from new technologies, domestic industry organizations such as the Virtual Reality Industry Alliance (IVRA) have made some attempts—for instance, IVRA released the General Specification for Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Display Devices, providing a basis for performance definition and measurement methods for VR headsets. Such standards are significant for regulating markets and improving product quality. However, at the AR publication content and application level, China still lacks systematic norms.

3. Multi-dimensional Regulatory Paths for AR Publication Legal Risks in the Digital-Intelligence Era

3.1 Flexible Application of Judgment Standards, Promoting Industry Self-Discipline and Technology Empowerment

Establishing a comprehensive intellectual property protection mechanism is fundamental for promoting the healthy and sustainable development of AR publications. From a copyright protection perspective, AR publication producers should clearly label all copyright information for text, images, model creators, and other contributors in prominent positions within the book, enabling readers to clearly understand the copyright sources. This not only respects creators' intellectual labor, but also conveys copyright protection awareness to readers. Naturally, due to the special nature of AR publications, copyright information involves multiple forms, so labeling methods should evolve with the times. In addition to traditional copyright statements on covers, table of contents, or content pages, virtual interactive elements can embed copyright information within virtual scenes, or audio modules can declare patent information through voice prompts. Regarding the copyrightability determination of composite elements and machine-generated elements, judgment standards for originality should be applied flexibly. According to China's Copyright Law, the subject of copyright is original works that must simultaneously meet two conditions: "independent creation" and "minimum creativity." Simple element stacking and combination should not receive copyright protection. However, if generated elements involve human input of independent thought or expression, their originality contribution should be affirmed to some extent. Indiscriminately denying users' contributions is unfair—if those willing to experiment with new tools and create new content cannot obtain incentives, the core purpose of the Copyright Law to stimulate creativity cannot be fully realized [7].

From a patent protection perspective, creators and designers should conduct comprehensive patent searches and analysis during the early stages of AR publication research and development to understand existing technological levels and patent distributions, thereby avoiding redundant R&D and infringement risks. They should then reasonably plan patent application timing and layout strategies according to R&D progress and market demand to form an effective patent protection network. For examination institutions, they should clarify authorization standards and categories for AR publication patents to ensure granted patents possess novelty, inventiveness, and practicality, giving higher priority and protection to AR publication patents involving key technologies and core innovations. From a trademark protection perspective, on one hand, AR publication designers and creators should conduct comprehensive, multi-field layouts, appropriately adopting defensive registration and multi-category registration methods—but with limits, as some defensive registrations can actually be avoided through improving the classification system for goods and services and distinctiveness determination rules [8]. On the other hand, industry self-discipline and cooperation should be promoted by introducing copyright credit mechanisms to collaboratively address infringement dilemmas [9] and establishing trademark information sharing platforms to facilitate enterprises' timely understanding of industry dynamics and trademark infringement information. Notably, in the AI era, technologies such as OCR, digital watermarking, encryption, and blockchain can also be fully utilized to protect the special content of AR publications [10].

From a legal perspective, compliance with relevant laws and regulations is the cornerstone of ensuring user data security. China's traditional laws for protecting personal privacy mainly include the Civil Code of the People's Republic of China, Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China, and Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China. AR publication designers and developers must strictly follow these laws and regulations to ensure they always adhere to the principles of legality, legitimacy, and necessity when collecting, storing, processing, and transmitting user data, safeguarding readers' personal privacy and data security. However, in the digital-intelligence era, users' disadvantaged position is further intensified, so user rights should be expanded within reasonable limits. For example, the original notification-consent mechanism should be optimized—data controllers should notify users in an obvious, clear, and understandable manner to ensure effective notification, and set graded consent standards based on personal information types, with higher consent thresholds for more important and sensitive personal information. Users should have complete rights to refuse, delete, and ultimately interpret their personal information data to counterbalance the dominant position of data controllers in the digital-intelligence era.

From a technical perspective, AR publication designers and developers should adopt advanced encryption technologies to encrypt user data, ensuring security during transmission and storage to build robust security barriers. For instance, they can employ differential privacy (introducing noise to obscure data), federated learning (distributed machine learning to reduce data transmission costs and risks), and generative adversarial networks (generating highly realistic virtual datasets), while comprehensively deploying multi-layered security measures such as access control, security auditing, and intrusion detection to strictly prevent data leakage and misuse. From an organizational perspective, publishing houses should strengthen internal management, enhance employees' security awareness and operational skills, and reduce data leakage risks from the source. Additionally, as readers in the digital-intelligence era, they should also improve their personal information privacy protection awareness when reading AR publications—for example, carefully reading and understanding authorization prompts when using AR publication apps, cautiously granting permissions to access personal information, resolutely refusing or disabling unnecessary permission requests, and developing good data cleaning habits by regularly checking and clearing personal information on AR publication platforms, including sensitive data such as reading records and browsing history. For unused accounts or applications, they should promptly cancel or delete relevant information.

3.3 Establishing Collaborative Regulatory Mechanisms, Upholding the Unity of Rigidity and Flexibility

The biggest challenge currently facing AR publication content supervision and compliance review is the relatively single regulatory subject and the lag of targeted laws and regulations behind technological iteration. Based on digital publishing industry supervision practices, the main regulatory subjects include government departments, enterprise self-regulation, industry internal supervision, media supervision, and social supervision. However, the latter three have not yet become mainstream, resulting in relatively weak regulatory strength, and guidance for media supervision and industry internal supervision urgently needs strengthening [11]. In the future, the AR publishing field should form a multi-subject collaborative regulatory mechanism to ensure regulatory strength and accuracy. Naturally, since AR publications are entirely new products of the digital-intelligence era, attention should also be paid to combining rigid and flexible regulation, adhering to the principle of unifying value rationality and instrumental rationality, and making appeal and defense channels more accessible and diverse. On one hand, reliance on clear laws, regulations, and policy standards as mandatory measures sets insurmountable bottom lines for market participants, including strict content review to ensure healthiness, positivity, and alignment with mainstream social values. On the other hand, more flexible and efficient methods should be used to respond to market changes, encouraging industry associations to formulate standards higher than legal requirements, guiding enterprises toward self-improvement, and utilizing advanced technologies like big data and AI to enhance regulatory efficiency. Simultaneously, public participation should be strengthened by establishing feedback mechanisms, making consumer and user voices important bases for regulation, thereby promoting systematic, scientific, and rationalized AR publication content supervision and compliance review. Moreover, for digital frontier technologies like AR, significant legal gaps and ambiguities exist, making it difficult for legislation, judiciary, and law enforcement to keep pace with technology [12]. Therefore, government and relevant institutions need to closely monitor AR publication market dynamics, timely revising and improving relevant laws and regulations to adapt to challenges posed by new technologies.

Certainly, AR publications contain rich elements and higher technical content compared to traditional books, making technical supervision essential. However, unified technical supervision standards have not yet been formed [13], leading to issues such as uneven data quality, inconsistent data formats, and difficult data security guarantees in the market. In 2023, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the Overall Layout Plan for Digital China Construction, clarifying that Digital China construction must consolidate the "two foundations" of digital infrastructure and data resource systems. Therefore, it is necessary to fully leverage the roles of government, industry associations, enterprises, and other multiple parties to formulate unified data standards and norms, ensuring the uniformity, standardization, and operability of data quality, data structure, and data exchange. The government can introduce relevant policies to guide and support the formulation and implementation of data standards; industry associations can organize experts for research and discussion to formulate industry-specific data standards; enterprises can actively participate in standard formulation and implementation to promote the standardized development of the AR publication market.

Digital-intelligence publishing has become an important component of the cultural industry, and the extensive and deep application of AI technology in publishing is a crucial measure to vigorously promote industrial integration and high-quality development. In the digital-intelligence era, AR publications launched using new technologies such as AI represent important symbols of the publishing industry's continuous innovation in product forms and construction of new reading ecosystems. AR, VR, and MR publishing resources have transformed traditional book reading methods, but their legal risks also warrant deep reflection. Only by adhering to the overall approach of unifying value rationality and instrumental rationality, seeking a balance between technological development and human values, creating a new situation of multi-party collaborative governance for technology application risk, ensuring the content quality and educational value of such publications, and promoting digital-intelligence technologies represented by AR to become important engines for technological transformation and industrial empowerment, can we facilitate the free flow and efficient allocation of production factors in the publishing industry and safeguard the comprehensive high-quality development of the industry.

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Author Biographies:
Lu Guixi (2001—), male, from Qingdao, Shandong, Master's student at Shandong University, research interests include civil and commercial law, intellectual property, and computational law.
Wang Zhuang (1969—), female, from Changchun, Jilin, Ph.D., Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Beijing Language and Culture University, research interests include digital publishing, international publishing, and children's reading and publishing.

(Responsible Editor: Li Yansong)