Another possible angle:
“Nothing to see here - this is the sort of output you’d expect to find if you use ‘Optimize Scanned PDF’ in Acrobat. It slices the large image up to save on bandwidth.”
I’ve not experienced this myself so I’ll take this comment I saw over at NRO at face value and ask if any of you all have a similar experience.
I’m not sure how it explains the clipping paths though...
The we should be able to reproduce it from the same machine... what did they use to copy this?