He was arrested in 2011 and charged in a scheme in which he allegedly logged into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and using it to download millions of academic journal articles from a database called JSTOR, owned by a nonprofit group.

WSJ: Legal Case Strained Troubled Web Activist

Another is based solely on the contents of a database of academic articles.

ECONOMIST: University rankings

The most recent issue contained articles about using the Internet for education and about the EDGAR database of corporate information maintained by America's Securities and Exchange Commission, all electronically linked to the resources on the network that they describe.

ECONOMIST: From the archive

Our technology combines a large database of structured data, a real-time feed of stats, and a large database of phrases, and algorithms to tie it all together to produce articles from two to eight paragraphs in length.

FORBES: An Author Turns to Software to Take the Tedium out of Writing