By the way, Rob, good stuff on the blog. I'm not a big Kirby fan, myself, but it's a good read.
Unsurprisingly there are all sorts of opinions on this, but I think what you wrote is very clear and makes sense.
Again, though, be sure to double-check everything. Up until recently, I had assumed that registration was a big part of copyright, until Ed Love (you may have seen his excellent "Cash Gorman" pages floating around) pointed out that the law never says anything to that effect.
The great thing about the Internet is that it puts so much information into the hands of laypeople like us, but at the same time, it also lets plenty of laypeople assume that things like continual publication, money paid, and the size of companies has a bearing on whether a copyright was maintained.
I suspect there may be zero Kirby stories I could post without someone complaining, but my hope is that maybe there are some stories from maybe the 50s I can post just to give my weblog some variety. It seems a shame to me that a Kirby Museum site cannot show a 5 page Kirby story without the risk of some kind of retaliation.
Keep in mind that there are "complaints" and there are "complaints by someone with standing to sue." The former can be ignored or used to educate readers--after all, something in the public domain is something that all of us actually own. I mean, yeah, there are people who'll shout because they assume that everything Kirby touched is (or "should be," whatever that may mean) property of the Kirby estate, but those aren't people to worry about.
The latter complaints are a bit more serious, but if you have the information to back up your assertions, only a very bad lawyer pursue it further unless you're provably wrong--the loser in a copyright case pays the winner's legal fees, so it's not a place to mess around. And if you happen to be wrong, it's much less likely that they'll make a big deal over things, if you show them what documents you used to come to that wrong conclusion and offer to remove the offennding material.
(As a case in point, a few years back, there was a guy who was selling OCRed scans of the original Doc Savage stories. Conde Nast currently holds the copyright, and they tried very hard to work things out with the guy, including just asking for royalty payments and the inclusion of a copyright statement. They didn't sue him until he refused those terms and insisted that he could CLAIM the copyright from them because they hadn't published anything with Doc Savage. So often, even if someone does come to complain, as long as you have their attention, they can be quite willing to help out.)
What books are PD and what constitutes fair use is a topic that I find fascinating as we watch intformation exchange evolve on-line, so I'll be curious to see how his all plays out in terms of sharing and discussing Kirby stories in he future.
Oh, definitely, especially since Fair Use isn't really a codified thing and, as you point out, merely displaying a story for discussion purposes is, on the Internet, nearly equivalent to publishing that story.
Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail, rather than yet another round of companies lobbying for more restrictive copyright terms and people turning pirate because they've had it with laws that prevent them from using what they legally purchased. (It's a sore point to me, because I grew up in amongst the copy-protection arms race on the 8-bit home computers and the Stalinist SPA ads.)
