If we replace "short-lived" with "third-party", it would clear up the confusion without adding any more characters.

That's honestly just an expression of how the "base level" of corporate ethics and morality has sunk so low that it is fully believable that such a site could have been spun up by an employee of Corgi, so many of us are conditioned to take the worst possible interpretation of any such headline. I did the same, actually, until I clicked through and skimmed it.

However, the headline itself does not say anything like that. It simply says they "killed" the website. Which they did, via legal threat. I think the specific wording they used was more engagement bait than anything, and honestly a quite mild version of it compared to many. Might even have been completely unintentional.