> Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment

And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.

Their infringement is different, and would really be a trademark issue if we hadn’t just invented the idea of copyrighting a character separately from the story they are a part of in the ‘30s (they are not individually copyrightable under the original text).

There’s a substantive difference between ingesting other people’s work and hosting copies of fans knockoff models of their favorite characters.

It’s even weirder because in other mediums this wouldn’t even be a thing. Nobody gets nearly as up in arms about fans doing their own cuts of movies, or re-using characters in written fan fiction, or etc. Very odd to me how up in arms people get about this specifically for visual art.