Santiago Vendors Lose Income as Thieves Sell Stolen Photos Back to Creators

Valentina Rojas runs a ceramics stall at the Feria Artesanal de Bellavista every weekend. Last March, she discovered her own product photographs, shot in her apartment in Barrio Italia, were being used by at least three separate online vendors to sell knockoff versions of her pieces on MercadoLibre and Instagram Shopping. The copies were priced 40 percent below her originals. She has not been able to get any of the listings removed.

Rojas is not alone. Across Santiago, a growing number of artisans, photographers, small retailers and community content creators are confronting the same problem: their digital images duplicated, stripped of watermarks and redistributed without consent, sometimes to compete directly against them in the same marketplaces where they built their businesses. The issue has crystallised into a concrete economic grievance in a city where informal digital commerce has expanded sharply since the pandemic years.

A problem growing in plain sight

The surge in complaints tracks closely with the broader growth of Chile's e-commerce sector. According to the Cámara de Comercio de Santiago, online retail transactions in Chile grew by roughly 22 percent between 2022 and 2024, pulling hundreds of thousands of small vendors onto digital platforms for the first time. Many of those vendors invested in professional photography precisely because product images are the primary selling tool in an online storefront. That investment is now being systematically exploited.

At the Centro de Atención al Emprendedor on Calle Huérfanos, caseworkers say image-theft complaints have become a regular topic in consultations over the past eighteen months, though the centre does not yet track them as a separate category. The Corporación Santiago Creativo, which supports cultural and creative economy workers across the Región Metropolitana, has fielded similar concerns from members in communes including Ñuñoa, San Miguel and Providencia. Neither organisation has published formal figures, but both describe the volume as significant enough to warrant dedicated guidance sessions.

For many affected vendors, the financial damage is twofold: they lose sales to cheaper competitors using their own imagery, and they suffer reputational harm when inferior products are associated with photographs they took. A handmade leather goods seller based in the Mercado Central area described discovering, on a Tuesday morning in April, that a Buenos Aires-based reseller had been using seventeen of her catalogue images for six weeks before she noticed.

What the community is asking for

Community members affected by the problem are not primarily asking for criminal prosecution. They want faster takedown mechanisms from the major platforms, clearer legal guidance in Spanish that addresses Chilean law specifically, and affordable registration tools for small creators who cannot pay for formal intellectual property filings through the Instituto Nacional de Propiedad Industrial, known as INAPI, whose standard trademark registration process currently costs around 4 UTM, approximately 280,000 pesos at current rates, and requires documentation that informal sellers often lack.

A graphic designer who works out of a shared studio in Barrio Yungay said she has resorted to embedding invisible steganographic markers in every image she publishes, a technical workaround she learned from an online forum rather than from any official programme. She estimates she spends three hours a week running reverse-image searches on her portfolio. That is time she is not designing or earning.

INAPI does operate a free educational resource called Tu Marca, Tu Negocio, oriented toward small business owners, but awareness of it remains low among the artisan and creative communities most affected by image duplication. The Municipalidad de Santiago's Oficina de Fomento Productivo has begun including intellectual property modules in its Emprendedores en Acción workshop series, with sessions scheduled through August 2026 at the Centro Cívico on Plaza de Armas.

For vendors like Rojas, the practical next step is to document every instance of duplication with timestamped screenshots, file formal complaints directly through each platform's intellectual property reporting portal, and consult INAPI's online guidance before pursuing any paid legal option. The Corporación Santiago Creativo has also announced it will host a dedicated Q&A session for affected members at its Providencia office later this month, a small but concrete response to a problem that has quietly cost the city's creative workers real money.