I'm glad he posted about it though, that legal issue regarding robots.txt is good to know.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18721-data-sifted-from...
I'd imagine they want to deter people from following in my footsteps, so publicizing their actions serves as a warning.
If anything, I'm encouraged to start a publicly-available database based on crawling Facebook. Don't associate your name with it, crawl from your Ipredator account, and make sure your data is spread far and wide. Then they can sue the Entire Internet like the music companies are having so much success with.
Information wants to be free.
(Also, what's the worst that could happen? You get sued, and Facebook gets a few thousand bucks from your savings account and your used mattress? OH NOES.)
By the time they get a court order to take the data down, if they even bother, people will have already distributed it, and it'll be another 09:f9:11:02-type fiasco.
I hope he releases the code he used, although I wouldn't really blame him if he doesn't.
I think the full quote is something like "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive". As I recall, it was about the dichotomy between the fact that you could copy bits for free, and that information was very valuable.