With search engines and other crawlers, there wasn't easy ways to monetize "copyright theft" at scale. Google, which had the biggest share of eyeballs, was much more equitable in sharing revenue to content producers (who wanted to monetize). And Google was probably more just in taking action against copyright theft.
Individual high value IP was always much less accessible (not available as a webpage on the internet). Gen AI/LLMs with the internet scale data is too powerful and maybe easier to monetize.