Milan's Creatives Speak Out: How Duplicate Images Are Eroding Trust in the City's Digital Economy

Photographers, graphic designers and small business owners across Milan are raising the alarm about a growing problem: the unauthorised reuse and duplication of their digital images across e-commerce platforms, social media and marketing materials — and they say existing remedies are too slow and too costly to help most of them.

The issue has gained fresh urgency in mid-2026 as the city gears up for the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, now fewer than five months away. Brand imagery linked to the Games, local fashion houses and the broader design economy is being scraped, duplicated and redistributed at a pace that intellectual property lawyers say has accelerated sharply since generative AI tools lowered the barrier to mass image replication. The timing matters: Milan's creative sector accounts for a significant share of the Lombardy regional economy, and the city's identity as a global design capital depends partly on protecting the visual work that defines it.

Voices From the Neighbourhood Studio to the Startup Floor

On Via Tortona, in the Zona Tortona design district that hosts Fuorisalone during Milan Design Week each April, independent photographers and visual artists describe a frustrating cycle. They upload portfolio work to showcase their craft, only to find identical images appearing weeks later on unrelated commercial sites, stripped of attribution and watermarks. Several say they have filed formal takedown requests through platform complaint systems and waited months for resolution.

The problem is not confined to freelancers. Staff at co-working hubs clustered around the Porta Nuova district — including spaces along Viale della Liberazione — report that startup founders building product catalogues have discovered their original product photography duplicated by competitors on Italian and cross-border marketplaces. For a small operation running on tight margins, commissioning legal help to pursue each infringement is often impractical.

The Associazione Fotografi Professionisti Italiani, which represents professional photographers nationally and has a regional network active in Milan, has documented a rise in member complaints about image duplication over the past two years. The organisation has called on platform operators to implement automated duplicate-detection tools proactively, rather than placing the burden of reporting solely on rights holders. Community members in Milan echo that ask directly: they want platforms to act before harm occurs, not after.

What the Evidence Shows — and What Comes Next

The scale of the problem can be measured, if imprecisely, through publicly available data. The European Union Intellectual Property Office published figures in 2025 showing that digital copyright infringement across EU creative sectors costs the industry billions of euros annually, with visual content among the most frequently misused categories. Italy's own Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni has taken steps toward stricter platform accountability under the EU Digital Services Act, which came into full force for large platforms in February 2024, but enforcement at the level of individual image duplication remains uneven.

In Milan specifically, the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana — headquartered in the city and representing the fashion industry — has previously engaged with digital rights questions as part of broader anti-counterfeiting work, though its focus has historically centred on physical product copying rather than standalone image misuse.

For community members navigating the problem today, intellectual property practitioners advise several immediate steps: register original works with SIAE, Italy's copyright collecting society, to establish a clear date of creation; embed metadata and watermarks before publication; and use reverse-image search tools routinely to monitor unauthorised use. When infringement is found, the EU's streamlined notice-and-action mechanism under the Digital Services Act provides a faster escalation path than older national complaint routes.

Looking ahead, a working group convened by the Comune di Milano's culture and innovation directorate is expected to publish guidance before the end of summer on protecting creative digital assets — guidance that community members in Brera and Zona Tortona say is long overdue. Whether it will carry enough weight to change platform behaviour is the question they are pressing hard.