The Department of Justice has filed suit in federal court Tampa, Florida charging Gregory Steven Hart, who ran six pirate Websites that provided unauthorized access to more than six million pages of comics and magazines, with violations of U.S. copyright laws.  A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office told the AP that the Department of Justice had “taken civil action to shut down the Websites and take custody of the Website domains.”

Hart has ignored “cease and desist letters” from comic book publishers arguing that since visitors to his sites could only read and not download comics the comics that he had posted, he was operating some sort of free Internet lending library, a contention that government lawyers didn’t buy for a second.

The lawsuit follows in the wake of actions by the FBI, which acted to shut down the html Websites in early May (see “FBI Shuts Down Comic Scan Site”).