Correct. It was simply providing open access to some scientific articles. He "stole" some research papers from people who didn't even do the research, and for that they tried to ruin his entire life. For... what? The potential of losing some profit?

And they ended up losing anyway. It was just pointless.

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It was similar to what happened with PACER; those documents were public-domain and yet were being charged for, so they used a library's credentials to download them… and when they looked at them, they found them full of PII leaks:

We sent our results to the Chief Judges of 31 District Courts ... They redacted those documents and they yelled at the lawyers that filed them ... The Judicial Conference changed their privacy rules. ... [To] the bureaucrats who ran the Administrative Office of the United States Courts ... we were thieves that took $1.6 million of their property.

So they called the FBI ... [The FBI] found nothing wrong ...