The HN is wrong, he didn't sold the images, the images were available for free.

I think it was a creepy stupid illegal [1] idea, but I think he was not motivated by money.

[1] He scraped the images from the site, that is probably illegal. And then he distributed them with a CC0 license that is also illegal if you don't have the copyright of the images.

Recent HN discussion of the TC report: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14228128 (65 points, 1 day ago, 77 comments)