I work in the industry, can confirm, the tactics used to dissuade people for aggregating horse racing data so we can sell $2 PDFs are extremely counter-productive and reflect the age of the industry.

Several orgs, including Equibase (US-based, the gate keeper of a good portion of handicapping data) will regularly send cease and desist orders to people who attempt to automate aggregation of data even with free, publicly available content. That's at least half the reason PDFs are used when customers purchase data access, to make aggregation harder (you should see some of the white space, character encoding fuckery they use to throw off aggregators).

I suppose some of this often depends the quality of the data as well. Most data entry happens at the track during the race by a human, none of the data collection about races or the horse stats are collected by a computer, it's 95% hand entered. That also goes for pedigree information and other statistics including medications, weights, etc. And 100% of that is usually self-reported.

Much of the current handicapping in the industry is everyone trying to protect their personal mountains of data. Tech-minded people would love to provide open, controlled, API services so that people can do what they will with our mountains of data. But "giving it away for free" is a non-starter for the good ole boys at the top..