I'm familiar with Aaron Swartz's case, and that is actually why I phrased it as "books". In any case, while tragic, Swartz wasn't prosecuted for copyright infringement, but rather for wire fraud and computer fraud due to the manner in which he bypassed protections in MIT's network and the JSTOR API. This wouldn't have been an issue if he downloaded the articles from a source that freely shared them, like sci-hub.
It would be incredibly naive to assume that the scraping done for these models did not at any point circumvent protections.
The fundamental contention is that both accessed, saved and distributed material that they didn't have a "right" to access, save, and distribute. One was made a billionaire for it and another was driven to suicide. It's not tragic, it's societal malpractice.
