Henry
Autoexreginated
I thought Paizo isn't even the ones that originally did the PSRD...some third party did it and Paizo scrambled to do damage control by putting up their own, is my recollection.
The way the license works, with a fantasy game so close to 3.5 like Pathfinder, it would take a full time in house counsel to go over each new rule and determine if it was close enough to an existing open rule to decide if it can be closed or not. Effectively, due to costs, this means it was just a heck of a lot easier to declare it all open. That, combined with chasing the guy who was already putting it all up for free, forced Paizo's hand to put it all up themselves.
Again, at least that is my recollection and assessment of how it happened. But I can't say I was paying very close attention at the time so I could well be off base.
Also...I don't mean to imply what they've done is bad. I like what they did...I like the fluff MORE, but I like that at least the rules are up.
Using the Wayback machine, I can find references of the PRD back to August of 2009, which is the same month it debuted. However, you might be right, because d20pfsrd.com did post their beta rules as content. I do know that they did have some squabbles with them early on, because they were posting stuff pretty soon after a book would be released, but they pretty quickly worked it out, and d20pfsrd voluntarily undertook a blackout zone of (I think) three months so that Paizo would be able to have their initial sell-through.