If this was some random guy who poked at a website, found SQL injection, told the company, and then the company looked at the logs and found out that the guy had dumped their whole database (in the course of seeing whether the SQLI actually worked) and had the guy prosecuted for the equivalent of felony computer fraud or misuse, I'd sympathize.
That actually happened. This actually happened too. What happened here is not so sympathetic. If you pull down 6 figures off pirated first-run movies and get an ICE site takedown, maybe not so much with the "putting the exact site back up on a different TLD with a fuck-you to the police on it", eh?
Sympathetic? Not so much. But when a future plaintiff is looking to cite precedent, most likely their court isn't going to say "In that previous case, that guy was obviously guilty of something, so that decision was possibly made out of expedience and we're not going to use it".
In fact, I'll go out on a limb and argue that a majority of rule-of-law-preserving precedents must be made when the defendant is/appears guilty - for if they appeared innocent, a court would probably find this by easier means rather than spending much effort nitpicking the procedural issues!
That actually happened. This actually happened too. What happened here is not so sympathetic. If you pull down 6 figures off pirated first-run movies and get an ICE site takedown, maybe not so much with the "putting the exact site back up on a different TLD with a fuck-you to the police on it", eh?