But he did have access via university. Besides, my understanding is he was scraping research journals, many of which would not have been possible without grants from tax dollars. Meaning the mere fact that the research is publicly funded means the journals should also be public.But they didn't even prove he distributed them. For all we know, he was planning to have an AI use them for training and apparently that isn't a problem.

You do realize as well that almost every site you visit makes API requests. And you can then use the same API to request other data directly. And the difference between "public" and unauthorized access often comes down to whether you used the same API that your browser would call, but instead decided to make other calls to it directly.