So I had a disquieting thought.
NCSoft seems to not know what to do with the CoH IP. They tried launching their own version with City of Hero and it was a dud. They closed down CoH because it's just not really their thing. They appear to be aware of this and the other private servers, but they're not (so far) doing anything about it. But Homecoming hit 100,000 players last week, which, IIRC, is 1/2 to 1/3 the size of the peak live playerbase. Superheroes are still big in Hollywood, and if there was ever a time for a AA superhero MMO to hit the market, it's now.
What if NCSoft is letting Homecoming run without harassment to build up the value of the IP so they can sell it to some other developer? Like I said, they don't seem to want it themselves. But if they could drop it for a few hundred mil or even a billion, they might do that. Then the new owner would almost certainly come down on these servers as infringing on their new investment.
I hope I'm way off base with this...