The difference here is that the scientific papers he downloaded weren't freely available to the public, like those scraped webpages would be. Corporate scrapers

The difference here is that the scientific papers he downloaded weren't freely available to the public, like those scraped webpages would be. Corporate scrapers have been sued[0] in the past for scraping pages from behind a login page / paywall. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn