>Stealing from a thief hurts thief industry which is a win for society.

You are welcome to study the law of any country. A crime against a criminal is still a crime.

>applicable laws when illegally copying copyrighted material from websites to their servers without author permission.

If the material is distributed in http without authentication, isn't that sufficient authorization from the distributor? I would think the search + web crawler era would have set plenty of precedent for this.

>Not a crime. AI companies also ignore robots.txt

Breach of contract is not a crime, agreed.

How about identity fraud (accounts by identity proxy, document KYC), computer crime (C&C residential proxies), conspiracy.

And after the June US directive to suspend Chinese access, smuggling, false statements to regulated entity.

These are all criminal charges that are presumably not levied because of the adversarial relationship between those countries. But if this happened in the US you would probably be seeing at least a civil claim and potentially criminal charges. Hell if this were in any other western country you would see the same. Consider CloudFlare vs Spain, much lighter criminal accusations, and there's already a criminal investigation brought where the CF CEO is indicted.

Non-trivial lack of nuance when you can distinguish between a domestic civil case and a criminal international case between 2 world powers with great judicial tension.