Pirate Website Shut Down by Coordinated Efforts of Department of Justice, FBI...
 

A nice read and a good start. This is what porn needs. Hopefully we can get a president and a few nice parallel facts out of this case. We will see...:thumbsup



Pirate Website www.Htmlcomics.com Shut Down by Coordinated Efforts of Department of Justice, FBI, Katten and Consortium of Comic Publishers
May 5, 2010


LOS ANGELES ? Comic book pirating website www.htmlcomics.com has been shut down and all of its servers confiscated, following an FBI search based on a warrant alleging criminal copyright infringement. The FBI investigation was performed in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice, a consortium of comic publishers and their legal counsel, a team of Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP attorneys specializing in the areas of intellectual property, publishing and comics, as well as local counsel in Miami.


Prior to the combined efforts of the consortium and the authorities, Htmlcomics was believed to have been the largest, best-known and most easily accessible website of its kind, producing rampant copyright infringement on a daily basis and depriving artists and publishers of hard-earned and much-needed revenue. By April 2010, the website claimed to have an average of 1.6 million visits per day and more than 6,630,021 pages of comic books offered for unrestricted viewing. Ridding the Internet of such a large source of pirated content is a major victory for the comic industry and the publishing industry in general.


Htmlcomics creator Gregory Hart, 47, acquired pirated copies of more than 5,700 series of comics spanning every major comic publisher in the United States, and made them available for public viewing on his site. The comics could be viewed from cover to cover and page by page and the infringing copies were reproduced on Hart?s servers and publicly displayed without authorization. Titles available included Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, The Simpsons, Futurama, Avengers, Incredible Hulk, Wolverine, Dilbert, Peanuts, Catwoman, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Hellboy, Star Wars, 300, Predator, The Mask, Iron Man and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among thousands of others.


The FBI?s Tampa Field Office headed the investigation leading to the warrant. The consortium of publishers cooperating with law enforcement include Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Bongo Comics, Archie Comics, Conan Properties Int?l LLC, Mirage Studios Inc., and United Media.

Katten has one of the nation?s premier, full-service entertainment and media practices, providing comprehensive domestic and international representation in the entertainment industry. The firm?s entertainment and media attorneys consider themselves partners with clients from concept to completion. When litigation becomes necessary, the practice represents its clients aggressively and effectively, in matters involving intellectual property issues, contractual and business tort disputes and distribution rights issues, among others. Katten also provides representation to entrepreneurs in business and personal matters. The firm?s entertainment attorneys pride themselves on providing cutting-edge, creative solutions to complicated problems.


http://www.kattenlaw.com/pirate-webs...rs-05-05-2010/


http://comicsworthreading.com/2010/0...n-html-comics/

Some people don't like their material being stolen, and do something about it.
Glad they shut him down.

Are these the dudes pumping out all those .cbr comics online? So much for the whole "if you like it, buy it in hard copy" concept.

Are you saying what I think your saying?:winkwink:

Wow. Big development!

That new Marvel app for the Apple iPad is hot. If they don't put out an Android version, I might be forced to pick up an iPad just for that alone.

The Marvel comic app is the one killer app I've seen for the iPad.

Coincidence that this site has been around for so long and soon after the launch of the Marvel app does something like goes down?

so how come they can shut down sites, but adult industry can't? no one around here cares enough?

will fbi help also adult biz to shutdown pirate sites? :)

That is in fact what I'm saying. :winkwink:

guy should have hid behind user uploads. lesson learned.

I read another article where the defendant did claim his content was user submitted.



I learned 2 things today: The comic book industry does not fuck around when people pirate their shit and the government loves comic books.:2 cents:

This is a great piece of news for copyrighted content.
The gov is not going to jump in and defend the adult industry, but if enough mainstream cases like the many cases going on now pull through (which they will) this will by default be a good thing for porn.:2 cents:

here's the part where someone comes in to say it was like free advertising.

What about all that free advertising the comic companies got out of this?

how let the dogs out...

That's what the moron gets for storing the content on his own servers in this country.

Very easy to get help closing something down when someone in a position to do it can publicly say 'I loved comics as a kid they need their business protecting'.

Nobody is going to publicly say 'I love porn and wank like a monkey in a zoo when I think nobody is looking, they need their business protecting'.

What's important is enough precedent is set that it doesn't matter what the content is.


.

fuck fbi:)

nice post .... really WTF?

.

gideongallery quit hiding like a little bitch and make an appearance in this thread to tell us all how piracy will never end but you have a new revenue stream that will not make us anything either

Here's why...

You can't get a half dozen adult companies to do anything, much less enough the industry on the whole. More over, if it costs any money.
:2 cents:

Maybe there is a VCR convention going on.

probably because many adult pirate sites/tubes base themselves offshore..it seems from this incident it involved a totally USA based operation...thats a lot easier to impliment.

Never heard of 'em...

Precedents just help with court cases being settled in a predictable way and are still only going to apply in a fixed jurisdiction - if the comic site had been hosted in Hong Kong or somewhere similar it would still be up.

Content is still going to be something that helps get or not get backing from someone in power.

I think a lot of the problem with controlling things on the internet is that the members of any government are usually old, judges are usually old, it's something they don't have a huge understanding of. Someone is bound to say politicians use twatter/facebook to argue against this but being able to spout 140 characters of utter shit nine thousand times a day or run an imaginary farm are very simple things compared to how complicated anything is going to be to them if they are confronted with someone that can just confuse the fuck out of them with technical stuff.

Who would read a comics online. The best on comics is the "paper".

When was the last time you saw the DOJ and FBI prosecute a mainstream comic book publisher ?

The FBI and DOJ will never lift a finger to help this industry. Why would they ?

Except if it's porn. The likes of PTNA, Emp and Cheg all still there and pimping your content.

I was wondering the same thing.

Nothing beats reading a comic on paper, wheres the charm in reading it digital :(

I see what you did there :thumbsup:1orglaugh

Gideon has a new job - he's a traffic manager for Naughty America now

Lolicon doesn't count.:321GFY

Score +1 for the FBI. Nice work. :)

Hah I wondered what happened to that site, I used to check it, great source for old comics scans.

FWIW it did seem to legitimalely be a sort of online "library", it had full runs of comics like the fantastic four from the 60s onwards, hardly zero-day scans, and the frames were carefully designed to stop people from saving the images (Images were actually on another server htmlc0mics.com, I found it when digging through the html source to save a page of said 60s fantastic four) so the casual user wouldn't be able to save anything.

I run ad blocking so I dunno about ads but I didn't see any. I could see it wasn't gonna last, far too blatant.

Not anymore. Check out the Marvel iPad App I mentioned above. This app alone has me contemplating the purchase of an iPad, though I've vowed against in. :1orglaugh

Of all the iPad apps I've seen, this is worthy of the title "Killer App".

My last hope is that there's an Android version in the works.

Yea, where is he? Piracy related thread, cmon Gideon!

That's the SICKNESS right there. Next step: fully interactive comic books

and the next step after that....

Fully Interactive Comic Book Porn with Fleshlight plugin...

What's the old saying, 'wank away like a monkey in the zoo'?


Spanx!
Jack

You content providers just need a big law firm to believe they can make lots of money or get "lots of publicity" from going after illegal tubesites and "the people/sites that profit from them". How to convince them of this? I really don't know.

Jenner Block is already doing it... but expect the price tag to hire them to exceed $500,000 on a complex tube site copyright infringement case.

We have handled less complex copyright infringment cases through trial and our fees have exceeded $150,000.00.

The prospects of collecting on a judgment from an off-shore tube site are almost nil.

Well, for one thing I doubt marvel comic's first instinct was to setup a competing content theft site for comic book uploads and do some deals to buy traffic off of the site that was stealing their content in the first place.

Quoted for the truth.