It was a situation where the common good outweighed the benefits of respecting copyright law handily, besides that the only thing that changed is the machine where the content was hosted.
I do not pass it off as my own, have a very clearly established procedure for removing the data at the request of the copyright holder.
Think of it as a hosting provider going out of business and a new one taking over the corpse of the old one. That it happened without contacting the owners is simply because the vast majority of the owners does not have contact information to begin with.
