Congratulations! This is a fascinating thing in MMO history, and hopefully it will pave the way for other resurrected games to gain legitimacy.
The only similar case I can think of is Myst Online: Uru Live, which, after being shut down the first time (by Ubisoft), survived as a community of private servers dubbed Until Uru. If I remember correctly, that had the informal approval of Cyan Worlds. They, too, cared deeply about the game and wanted to see it continue in any form possible. The private servers also demonstrated interest in the game, helping it get a new publisher (GameTap, a now-defunct service that was sort of trying to be Game Pass long before Game Pass came into existence).
After that second shutdown, Cyan decided to take on the donation-assisted cost of hosting MO:UL themselves. They open-sourced it and have since then accepted bug fixes and some new content from the community. I don't think they ever prohibited the private servers.
