'My photos are everywhere and I never gave permission': Hong Kong residents speak out on duplicate image theft

Kwun Tong graphic designer surnamed Chan found her wedding portrait on a Mong Kok bridal studio's promotional banner last October — eight months after she had posted it on Instagram. She had never heard of the studio, never signed a release form, and received no payment. "I walked past the shopfront on Fa Yuen Street and just stopped dead," she said. "The image had been cropped and colour-corrected. They made it look like their own work."

Chan's experience is far from isolated. Duplicate image theft — the unauthorised copying, reposting and commercial use of photographs scraped from social media or stock databases — has become one of the most common grievances logged by the Hong Kong Consumer Council, which recorded a 34 percent rise in intellectual property complaints between January and May 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. The surge tracks the proliferation of AI-driven content tools that can harvest, alter and redistribute images at industrial scale.

The timing matters. Hong Kong's Copyright (Amendment) Ordinance, which came into partial effect in June 2022, introduced stronger protections for digital works, but enforcement remains largely complaint-driven. The Intellectual Property Department, based in Wanchai Tower, has no dedicated image-scraping task force. Critics say the four-year-old framework was designed for an earlier era of infringement, before large-language-model pipelines began ingesting and remixing visual content at the pace seen today.

Voices from Sham Shui Po to Taikoo

A freelance photographer based in Kennedy Town who goes by the handle @hkstreetframes told The Daily Hong Kong his watermarked travel images appeared on at least three Mainland-registered e-commerce accounts on Xiaohongshu within 72 hours of each original post, the watermarks digitally removed. He filed takedown requests through the platform's reporting system in February 2026 and is still waiting on two of the three cases. "The platform's process assumes you'll give up," he said. "Most people do."

A Taikoo Shing-based secondary school teacher discovered her family holiday photos — taken at Sai Kung's High Island Reservoir — being used by a Shenzhen travel agency to market packages to prospective customers. The agency's WeChat posts had racked up more than 4,000 shares before she flagged the content. She contacted the Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Limited seeking guidance in April and was referred to a private solicitor. Legal letters to Mainland entities, lawyers told her, cost upward of HK$15,000 and offer no guarantee of removal.

Community legal clinic Hong Kong Community Legal Information Centre, which runs free Saturday sessions at Sheung Wan Civic Centre, has seen demand for its intellectual property clinics spike since March. Volunteers there say the most common scenario involves individuals whose images were scraped, run through an AI upscaling tool, and then sold on microstock platforms — sometimes back to Hong Kong-based buyers who had no idea they were purchasing stolen work.

What victims can do now

The Intellectual Property Department's current guidance recommends filing a cease-and-desist notice directly with the infringing platform before pursuing civil action. For images hosted on platforms operating under Hong Kong jurisdiction, the Copyright Ordinance's section 118 notice-and-takedown mechanism can compel removal within 14 days. For cross-border cases involving Mainland or overseas servers, the process is slower and less predictable.

Reverse image search tools such as Google Lens and TinEye remain the fastest first step for individuals who suspect duplication. Digital watermarking services, several of which are marketed to photographers through the Hong Kong Institute of Professional Photographers, now offer blockchain-anchored timestamping for around HK$300 per year — a figure that has remained stable since late 2024 even as scraping incidents have multiplied.

The Consumer Council told The Daily Hong Kong it is reviewing whether to add image theft to its formal mediation remit, a decision expected by the end of the third quarter of 2026. Until then, affected residents are largely navigating a patchwork of platform policies, private legal fees and slow-moving government processes — while their images keep circulating.