I don't like posting here because people will tend to interpret posts as hidden tips for characters that will be included and all. But there's a small clarification to make regarding to third party characters and C&D.
As we have already stated, any character that appears on Brawl is a valid candidate, even the third-party ones, going from tails to gray fox. In the unlikely case of a C&D of Konami or Sega due to a inclusion of their characters the results would only be the removal of that character and not the project being shut down. It would still be very unfortunate due to spending a lot of time on character just to remove him afterwards. In theory we could add any possible character and only be susceptible to that character's removal, our policy of brawl-only characters not only serves to be a professional way to procede but also in a way so we have a much less risk of having to remove a character we have already included in the case one of them is a third-party character in Brawl. In fact the third-party characters which would have the less chance of receiving a C&D would be Shadow and Gray Fox due to already having Jason Griffith and Rob Paulsen already credited as doing their voices in the game.
The only company which a C&D would result in the PMBR being shut down is one from Nintendo itself, we don't even need to affect sales of smash 4 (which we most likely won't), if one day the Nintendo guys wake up and decide to shut us down they can and there's nothing we can do about it.