It has been a loooong time since that. I'm pretty happy they not only went the legal route, but also were successful doing it while retaining a relatively large library. They could have failed and shut down. Remember that back then, Japanese producers didn't take overseas demand seriously, many of them don't even know that it existed or that there were many fansubs.
They basically infringed copyright and ripped off Japanese animators, and took the legal route so they can extract more money… sounds like your run of the mill Taiwanese CD rip business back in the 90s..