Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1038387-20150101215847

I originally posted this here, but it requires a bigger audience.

As most of you that've been around for a year or more, we've had some cleanups. We used to have a lot of MLJ/Archie stuff. We used to have a lot of licensed material (only ERB now needs some cleanout) but we got rid of that. We've gotten rid of AC Comics, because that was copyright infringement. We've had discussions about other Golden Age publishers too, asking what exactly DC took over, but those faded away without a clear answer. Here's another: Fox Features Syndicate, and the cases of Blue Beetle and Phantom Lady.

Tangentically related to this are Ajax-Farrell and Holyoke.

Fox
Some info on Fox: founded by Victor A. Fox in the late 1930s. Worked with Will Eisner and Jerry Iger, but dropped them after he lost a Superman lookalike trial in 1939. Got new artists. Filed for bankrupcy in 1942, and again in 1950. Went out of business completely after CCA was founded in 1956.

Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle... first off, Holyoke. Holyoke acquired it after the 1942 bankrupcy. Then, when he was back on his feet, Victor Fox sued and got BB back. That explains that weird spell of (Holyoke) in the middle of Blue Beetle (Fox) Vol 1. When Fox quit altogether, BB was acquired by Charlton. Charlton was then acquired by DC. However, they've never reprinted any Golden Age Blue Beetle, so it's unclear whether they own those stories too.

Phantom Lady
Phantom Lady is considerably more troublesome.
 * In 1947, Quality no longer published PL, so Iger Studios, which thought they owned the rights, assigned it to Fox.
 * When Fox went out of business because of the Comics Code Authority, its assets were divided.
 * Some of PL went to Star Publications, which also folded because of the CCA.
 * It then apparently passed to Ajax-Farrell, which published 4 issues 1954-5.
 * Some time later, Ajax-Farrell's stock was published by Charlton, and they reprinted some PL stories, apparently, in the 50s and 60s (don't know where. Need to track that down).
 * IW Publications also published reprints, but their claim to the reprint rights isn't explained.
 * DC acquired the stock of Quality Comics in 1956, but didn't publish PL until 1970.

The problem in this is it is unclear whether Iger Studios had any legal right to assign their work to another publisher, and so whether the uses of the character after that are legit. Considering DC successfully contested the claim to Phantom Lady when Paragon/AC published new material on the character (they renamed their version Blue Bulleteer), they obviously think they own it, so Iger Studios did not have any right to reassign PL to other publishers.

Others
Aside from these two, the only Fox hero we have a page on is Sparky. That was never DC, so needs to go. Technically, Charlton only ever owned the character of Blue Beetle, not the other people in Mystery Men, Blue Beetle and Phantom Lady. Not even the comics they were in. For precedent: we don't have Centaur Comics' early Clock adventures.

What next?
All this means a decently-sized portion of Phantom Lady - the Fox and A-F years - is actually IP infringement. DC doesn't own that work, even if they owned the character at the time. There hasn't been any court case about it where DC explicitly challenges any of those publishers. They didn't do that until after they started publishing stories about her again - which is a prerequisite of filing infringement suits, IIRC.

So, should we get rid of Phantom Lady's non Quality, non DC stuff? We did it with AC's Good Girl Art. There, the case was the same: DC owns that character, but not the work.

Any thoughts, legal advice or irate "why do you get rid of everything"s? 