My assumption is he did not want to plea guilty to a bunch of felonies, I think I read that this was part of it. It's rather extreme to throw that many years at someone like him AND felonies, I don't think he should have gotten a complete slap on the wrist, but what he did was literally web scraping PDFs, the kind that OpenAI and Anthropic do all the time and get away with, only instead of them being some authors IP, they were publicly funded in many, many cases.