[BobbyTables2]

What’s ironic to me is that had these companies pirated only a single work, wouldn’t that be a chargeable crime?

Clearly Bonnie and Clyde shouldn’t have been prosecuted. Imagine they were just robbing banks for literary research purposes. They could have then used the learnings to write a book and sell it commercially…

Or imagine one cracks 10000 copyrighted DVDs and then sells 30 second clips… (a derived work).

To me, for profit companies and universities have a huge difference — the latter is not seeking to directly commercially profit from copyrighted data.