Besides if there are some small minded persons out there that think these PD or not (and they should be PD) obscure characters who are not reprint strips, belong to them, should they not be able to prove it first before persecuting someone for what is perceived as a violation?
That's sort of my point, though. As far as I know, people complain when it happens that the little guy is getting crushed, but this is how a company like Disney is likely to work. They want to do things by the books and in good faith (that you've made a mistake), so that IF they need to go to court, they're definitely the wronged party.
A trust fund baby who "bought the rights," even if they're not in the right? They could file frivolous lawsuits and name everybody you do business with as a defendant. A web host or payment processor has surprisingly little interest in keeping you as a customer if it causes them the least bit of trouble, which shuts you down fast.
If it doesn't, they can drag out the case to force you to spend money on lawyers. To my knowledge, this hasn't happened with "real" copyright cases, but it has certainly happened with the RIAA for kids
downloading music. They hold the statutory infringement of $150,000 per song (three times that, if they prove you know or didn't care it was copyright infringement) over their heads, subpoena their bank records, and demand a settlement of whatever the kid has in their accounts or threaten dragging the case out forever, even if they have no evidence. (Pornography shops have been doing the same thing with movies, with the added twist of making the case a public spectacle to drag your name through the mud.)
I'm not making a recommendation here, by any means. I'm certainly not a lawyer and I'm not anybody's father (is it still compulsory to say "that I know of," like "comedy" in the '90s?), so take that for nothing more than the framework I use to make these decisions. From what I've seen, Conde Nast (who owns the Street and Smith properties, if that's what we're talking about) is willing to play nice, but show them that you're not, and they'll rip you apart.
Keep in mind that copyright is about choosing who can publish (even if Hollywood wants to make it about who can have access, it's still about publication), and that includes suppressing circulation if they don't want something in the public eye. To give a probably-worthless hypothetical example, an artist's kid who inherited copyrights might refuse to let anybody publish it for thnking that was the work that destroyed their family, say.
And right now, they have that right, as long as they got the copyright statement right (automatic after 1988, for the most part) and filed a renewal (automatic after 1991, for books published after 1963), whether or not we agree. Personally, I take the opposite view. Works that are "culturally important" or even merely popular shouldn't be covered under copyright for so long, because they shouold be available to as wide an audience as possible--if there's a da Vinci working today, copyrights will prevent his work from being advanced by anybody but the rich. Plus, doing that would allow the obscure stuff to shine at the big companies, instead of watching them rely on yet one more rehash of something we've all seen before.
But that's just me.
