I know what you mean... the hypocrisy of it drives me mad. English-speaking fandom gets up in arms at any accusation of fanfic plagiarism, but 99% of art-theft is handwaved as 'oh, but they only borrowed it because they like it so much, they don't mean anything malicious'. Whether they meant to hurt feelings or not, I think a lot of fans don't realize just how hugely hurtful such an act is under the mores of Japanese fandom. From their point of view it makes foreign fandom look pretty crass -- not only do we borrow images from the original work to decorate our sites and blogs, we don't respect the creator's absolute right to control who sees her work and where it's posted. I think part of it, maybe, is that English-speaking fans aren't aware of just how much emphasis Japanese fandom places on privacy and secrecy. English fans talk about their pairings in public even outside conventions, post their porn fic to public spaces where lots of people can read it, and generally celebrate a culture of openness. Whereas Japanese fans often do their best to hide that they're fans at all, let alone yaoi writers/artists; they post their stories and art to personal sites where they control everything about how it's presented and who can access it; they go to great lengths to keep from being indexed in search engines; and far from posting porn in public, many will make you hunt around for secret hidden links or even make you personally email them for a password before you can look at their more sexual work (which in many cases won't even go beyond some mild nudity and kissing). Not to say that English-speaking fans don't worry about their privacy, because obviously we do, but I think Japanese fandom's obsession with flying under the radar and not letting the 'mainstream' know of its existence is several orders of magnitude beyond what most English fans are prepared to understand.