During that time the downloads board was run by a different company and may not have done a thorough enough job of reviewing the files.
While ICE does protect copyright, we are understanding towards character creation tools, since they generally can't be used without the books to support them. If they had lots of text copied from the books in them it would likely be an issue. Combat programs are a different matter as one of ICE's key differentiators is the use of critical tables and copying the tables from Arms Law into a spreadsheet or program would blatantly violate ICE's IP.