Feds file lawsuit against 6 Florida-based websites for allowing free access to comic books

Feds sue 6 websites for offering free comic books

MIAMI — The federal government has sued six websites that allowed visitors to view comic books for free without permission from the publishers or authors.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Tampa, Fla., by the U.S. Department of Justice against the domains ComicBooksFree.com, HTMLcomics.com and PlayboyMonthly.com, among others.

The lawsuit says Gregory Steven Hart of Tampa-based Database Engineers Inc. ran the sites. A phone message was left Friday with the company. No attorney for Hart was named in the lawsuit, nor was a phone number listed for Hart.

The FBI began investigating Hart in 2009. Batman, X-Men, The Simpsons and other comic books were available for free on the sites. HTMLcomics.com alone claimed to host over 100,000 issues.