The reason you see all the pop ups for cookies nowadays is because of GDPR, a European law. It absolutely does work like this. It’s vastly cheaper to run one system then 2 systems. It’s the same reason California emissions laws become defacto laws for the rest of the country.
I tried to buy the model from an artist recently for personal use(friend wanted some Mickey ears of a specific style). Person told me no and quoted me $130 with a 3 week wait time for a physical product that was something I could print in about an hour myself. For a Disney product they were already infringing on themselves.
Went elsewhere and found someone selling the model for $7. Figured that was fair for the effort to transform it into a model file.
Turned out I was wrong - only took me 20 minutes to print.
Some of these artists are ridiculous…