[citricsquid]

They can probably just do a find and replace for the entire internet :-)

I remember seeing that bit.ly and maybe tr.im had an "open" approach to URLs and formed some sort of service where they allowed anyone to easily replicate their URL database? I can't find any trace if it though, so I might have the wrong services, but that might be a possible solution, companies like Twitter could utilise that to "rescue" a large number of links.