Reminds me of when the internet collectively realized that the Sugimori watercolors for the original 251 Pokémon had been scanned and reproduced with the completely wrong colors in western media for over 20 years:

https://kotaku.com/pokemon-ken-sugimori-original-art-red-blu...

>How did the low-quality Pokémon scans circulate for so long?

Japanese people take copyright more seriously which would explain why there would be literal interest in creating illegal scans of them.