FBI Shuts Down Comic Scan Site

From ICv2:

"The FBI has shut down comic scan site htmlcomics.com and seized its servers in a raid supported by a consortium of comic publishers, according to an announcement by Katten Muchen Rosenman, the law firm representing the publishers consortium. Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Bongo, Archie, Conan Properties, Mirage, and United Media were involved. Htmlcomics.com was the largest site offering scanned American comics, according to the announcement, with an average of 1.6 million visits a day and over 6.6 million pages of comics from 5,700 series. The site was “…producing rampant copyright infringement on a daily basis and depriving artists and publishers of hard-earned and much-needed revenue", according to the publishers’ attorneys. The FBI investigation was conducted by its Tampa Field Office, which led to the search warrant served in the raid."

Can you believe that a bootleg site was getting that kind of traffic? 1.6 Million hits a day is crazy traffic, probably puts it in the top 1% on the web.

Of course these were mostly US comics, and the raid was instigated by a group of US publishers on a US bootleg site. Huge companies like Marvel and DC have the resources to go after these folks. Most bootleg Anime download and scanlation sites are overseas anyway, and thus are not touchable by US law enforcement.

Still, does the kind of traffic that site got tell anyone how huge the bootleg problem really is?