Milan's Traders and Residents Speak Out as Duplicate Images Flood Local Business Listings

Dozens of small businesses registered with Milan's Camera di Commercio have filed formal complaints this year over the unauthorised duplication of their product photography across Italian e-commerce platforms and aggregator sites. The problem, long dismissed as a minor technical nuisance, has grown sharp enough that the Unione Confcommercio Milano has placed it on the agenda of its July 2026 working group on digital trade practices.

The timing matters. With the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony scheduled for February 6, 2027, brands across the city are investing heavily in visual identity — new campaigns, refreshed catalogues, commissioned shoots. Duplicate-image theft now threatens to undermine those investments before they pay off, at precisely the moment Milan is positioning itself for peak global visibility.

What 'Duplicate Image Replacement' Means on the Ground

The phrase sounds bureaucratic. The experience is not. A ceramics workshop on Via Tortona, the design corridor in the Zona Tortona district, puts a new collection online and within days finds the same images appearing on a dozen unrelated listings on aggregator platforms, some selling counterfeit goods at a fraction of the original price. The workshop's own listing drops in search rankings because the algorithm flags its images as duplicates. The original creator is penalised for someone else's copying.

Several traders operating near the Mercato Metropolitano in Porta Genova describe a closely related problem: platforms that auto-generate product pages scrape images from their own catalogues, then list the same item independently, confusing customers and splitting reviews. One handmade leather goods seller in the Brera design district said — speaking without attribution because of an ongoing platform dispute — that three separate listings of her bags existed on a major Italian marketplace by March 2026, none of them created or managed by her.

Consumer confusion is the downstream cost. The Codacons consumer association, which operates across Italy including its Milan chapter, has previously documented how misleading listings erode buyer confidence in independent sellers. Market researchers at the Milan Polytechnic's design management faculty have noted in published work that visual authenticity is among the top three purchase-decision factors for consumers buying artisan or fashion goods online — a category that defines a substantial share of Milan's retail economy.

Residents and Traders Ask for Faster Platform Accountability

The frustration among affected community members isn't simply about lost revenue. It's about the asymmetry of the reporting process. Under the EU's Digital Services Act, which came into full effect for large platforms in February 2024, users have the right to contest illegal content removals and flag harmful listings. But smaller traders say the notice-and-takedown systems run by major platforms remain slow, often requiring multiple submissions before a duplicate listing is removed — a process that can take two to four weeks according to case documentation reviewed by Confcommercio.

At a public forum held at BASE Milano, the cultural and innovation hub on Via Bergognone, in late June 2026, independent traders asked the city's digital economy office to explore whether Milan could establish a local fast-track mediation service linked to the existing Sportello Unico per le Attività Produttive. The idea drew visible interest from attendees but no formal commitment.

Photographers are also affected. Several commercial photographers whose work was commissioned by fashion labels around the Quadrilatero della Moda say duplicate uploads strip their images of EXIF metadata, making ownership attribution nearly impossible after the fact. The Associazione Fotografi Professionisti Italiani has been lobbying the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy in Rome for mandatory metadata preservation standards since early 2025.

For now, the practical advice from digital rights advisors working with Confcommercio is straightforward: register original images with a timestamped content-hash service before publication, embed visible and invisible watermarks, and file DSA takedown notices citing the specific Article 16 provisions that apply to hosting platforms. It is slow work. It should not have to be.