I disagree that it's a one-off case. This case now sends a chilling effect to all security researchers. Next, what if a stock broker finds a press release on a web site that was published early, and makes money from it? What if a blogger finds a leaked photo of an unannounced product? The point is that they took a law that was meant to prevent you from hacking past security measures to get into a private computer, and successfully applied it to data posted on a public web server, and that is ridiculous, regardless what his intent was to do with the data.