What do you think would happen if somebody with a research agreement downloaded everything and released it all to the public? You'd probably then find that the two situations are very similar.
Now, what would happen if you breached the research agreement? You’d probably be sued for breach of contract. But that’s not what case.law is doing. It’s abiding by everyone’s legal rights: the original publishers who collected, archived, indexed, and added annotations to the case law, and the folks who helped digitize versions that could be freely distributed. The government paid for the courts so the cases are free, but it didn’t pay for all those other things and they aren’t free.
> If someone did a very similar thing here to what Swartz did with JSTOR, this situation would then be very similar to what Swartz did with JSTOR.
Analogously, one could ask what would happen if someone avoided their taxes vs. evaded their taxes. Both could be seen as morally the same act, but the legal consequences are different.