The thing is PAD had never had any contact with, knowledge of, or presence on s_d prior to that (at least, as far as I know). Neither the community nor whoever the poster was had any indication that PAD specifically didn't want his work scanned and posted.
It would be really unfair to that poster to point the finger at them for doing something we all did regularly with other comics. Posting scans from new comics and picking them apart was and is standard behaviour at scans_daily. Now we have stricter rules for posting so that we may be closer to fair use and focus our criticism more on the work rather than the creator as a person, so as to lessen the likelihood of our enraging the corporate powers that be.
If you're going to point the finger of blame to within the community, then point it at all of us members for perpetuating a culture where others had grounds to think of us as law-breaking wankers. (Personally, I enjoy and embrace my wanky piratehood, but I do also sympathize with those who might have objected to my posting 11 pages of a 22-page comic.) But even there, prior to the shut down the mods had been working on revamping the rules.
Scans_daily 1.0 was not a bastion of legality, however much we loved it, and it probably was only a matter of time until some creator or corporate entity decided it had to go. When that time came, it came in the form of a combination of PAD, Marvel and LiveJournal.
I really don't think it's fair or right to point the blame at one single poster.
In any case, scans_daily lives on and continues to be awesome, and we will have an even greater chance of surviving in the long-term once we have the security of living at DreamWidth. So. Happy ending.