Wasn't LinkedIn the one who used to access people's emails to farm contacts? They did it by testing the password signed up to LinkedIn against common mail services (Hotmail). If the users used the same password across both services then their email got trawled.
The first “trick” you linked to was a bug in a library that they already open sourced before the issue was raised. Pretty clear that it wasn’t nefarious or intentional and shows they didn’t in fact copy the clipboard contents.