Milan's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Shape the City's Visual Identity

Milan's image management problem is no longer a back-office nuisance. Across the city's commercial and civic infrastructure, from the towering LED screens along Corso Como to the municipally managed display boards near Piazza Gae Aulenti, duplicate imagery — the same photograph, rendering or graphic appearing in multiple placements without updated licensing or proper attribution — has quietly become a legal and reputational liability that city administrators and private operators can no longer defer.

The timing matters. With the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics now months away, the city is under extraordinary international scrutiny. Sponsors, broadcasters and urban planners are mapping every visual touchpoint across the metropolitan area. A cluttered or legally compromised image environment is not a minor aesthetic concern — it is a contractual risk that could complicate commercial partnerships worth tens of millions of euros. The IOC's brand protection protocols, which apply to all host-city communications infrastructure, leave virtually no room for unauthorised reproductions in high-visibility zones.

Where the Problem Is Concentrated

The issue surfaces most acutely in two zones. The first is Porta Nuova, where the Coima-managed mixed-use district has rapidly expanded its digital display network since 2023. Property managers there have acknowledged, in internal communications reviewed by trade outlets, a gap between the speed of content deployment and the rigour of image-rights verification. The second flashpoint is the Quadrilatero della Moda, where luxury brands along Via Montenapoleone and Via della Spiga routinely cycle campaign visuals across owned storefronts, pop-up displays, and third-party outdoor advertising simultaneously — creating a situation where the same image can appear in six or more placements under licenses that may only cover three.

The Comune di Milano's own public communications unit, based at Palazzo Marino, is also facing internal review. Municipal campaigns promoting the 2026 Games have drawn on an image archive assembled quickly in 2024 and 2025, and rights clearances for several photographs sourced from freelance photographers have not been fully reconciled, according to procurement documents accessible through the city's open-data portal.

Italian copyright law under Legge 633/1941, updated most recently by the 2023 legislative decree implementing EU Directive 2019/790, sets clear parameters: reuse of a protected image in a new context — even by the original licensee — can constitute a separate act of reproduction requiring fresh authorisation. Penalties for commercial infringement start at €500 per violation and can scale significantly where the infringing party has derived commercial benefit. For a luxury brand running a three-week campaign across 12 placements in the fashion district, exposure could reach five figures per image.

The Decisions That Cannot Wait

Three choices will define how this plays out before the Olympic torch route passes through the city in February 2026. First, the Comune must decide whether to commission an independent audit of its image archive — a process the city's Direzione Sistemi Informativi e Agenda Digitale is technically equipped to manage but has not yet formally initiated. An audit of comparable scope in Turin ahead of the 2006 Games cost approximately €180,000 and took four months. Milan's archive is estimated to be three times larger.

Second, private operators in Porta Nuova and the Quadrilatero will need to determine whether to adopt a unified digital asset management protocol — something Fondazione Fiera Milano has already piloted across its exhibition halls in Rho — or continue with fragmented vendor-by-vendor arrangements that increase duplication risk.

Third, and most politically charged, is the question of enforcement. The tension between the centre-right Regione Lombardia and the centre-left Sala administration at the Comune creates a gap in which neither authority has been eager to move first on a regulatory framework for commercial image use in shared public spaces.

Businesses and public agencies with displays in the affected zones should, at minimum, conduct internal rights audits before September 2026, when the city's Olympic-period communication blackout on non-sponsor advertising begins. The window to resolve legacy duplicate-image issues without external scrutiny is narrow. After that, the International Olympic Committee's compliance teams will be doing the reviewing — and they will not be filing polite internal memos.