You are correct, about the legal stuff. These companies are being sued all the time.
Doing this deal also makes processing the data a lot easier. Being handed a big ass database would be a lot easier than crawling for content.
What I posted was about how they operate. These companies showed time and time again that they don't really care what data they are taking or from whom. They will even take their own AI or machine learning content and put it in their own system.