> I wonder if they can say something like “we aren’t scraping your protected content, we are merely scraping this old model we don’t maintain anymore and it happened to have protected content in it from before the ruling”

I'm not a lawyer, but I know enough to be pretty confident that that wouldn't work. The law is about intent. Coming up with "one weird trick" to work-around a potential court ruling is unlikely to impress a judge.

Im not quite familiar with the google book project, but isnt this similar? Im pretty sure google got away with scanning copyrighted books in 2015 [0]

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/google-book-scann...