I don't want to rehash the comments section from Ars, but my overall take is this piece is a brief padded out way too far. I mean, it's "Settlement reached; details TK."
That Alsup is presiding is, to my mind, one of the best possible routes. IIRC, he taught himself a programming language a while back to rule on (this may be a hallucination) Oracle v. Sun. This is a judge who understands tech in its current state
And frankly, I think he split the baby correctly here. If you paid for or otherwise legally acquired access (think libraries) and create a transformative work from it, well, that's literally the fair-use carve out -- the scale is what makes it look so wildly different from a college student looking at microfiche for a term paper (yes, I'm old). And it's specious to imply that all this aggregation isn't transformative.
The problem is the works they didn't pay for. "Copyright infringement" is quite the anodyne term for "theft."