From what I understand, copying has always been an issue. In the Hori Smoku documentary, they mentinon that Sailor Jerry sometimes deliberately made mistakes in his flash, to fool copycats into doing them. I recently read in Jon Nordstrøms "Northern Tattooing", that the old timers in Nyhavn often made their flash kinda shitty, with much less details than the actual tattoo for the same reason. The internet wasn't an issue then, but now we have photoshop, so who's to say that an artist couldn't alter a picture of a tattoo a tiny bit before uploading it to instagram...