Cashing in for $20K with old content

I bought an expired domain recently with a decent domain/page authority (not amazing, 20s and 30s), but it has some good links, some from eHow, a few from a big newspaper and an edu link. One link comes from the owners new site (looks exactly the same, and has a picture of the person who ran it, so, pretty obvious) with very similar content. And, this new site links to the domain I now own.

So, I looked in the wayback machine and there's a lot of content, but I'm not sure if I can just copy that content and use it now. Is that illegal in any way?

I was thinking about just redirecting all the pages with some Page Authority to the home page and starting a new site, but it seems like I could skip a lot of content creation if I can use all the old content... what would you guys do?
 
I was thinking about just redirecting all the pages with some Page Authority to the home page

You'll be far better off putting some content on those exact URLs that was similar or the same as the content that was there. Google knows the mass-301-to-homepage trick and has acknowledged it publicly.
 
Thank you @Ryuzaki ... I need to be less lazy anyway. The content wasn't that great, wasn't terrible, but I could totally make it better. Thanks for the info!
 
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