Copyright
We Protect your work as creator
Aggressive Protection of Your Copyright
Your comic will be pirated. The only question is whether you fight back?
Botcomics includes copyright protection as part of our publishing service for our authors. That means as soon as your comic is published, you’re protected against piracy. Although piracy is impossible to stop, we work to ensure it doesn’t have a large impact on your comic’s sales.
Copyright Registration
To receive copyright protection, the essential first step is to register your copyright. Publishing with Botcomics includes copyright registration in the United States for our authors. The U.S. is the country with the strictest enforcement of copyright in the world, the most bilateral copyright treaties, and is the major international force for IP protection today. There is no better place to register your copyright and Botcomics has you covered. Copyright registration removes all doubt as to who owns what, what rights each party reserves, and is required to bring a federal copyright lawsuit against pirates.
We use custom-built monitoring software to search known pirate websites, bittorrent hubs, image/file lockers, and search engines for our comics. Many times we discover pirated content within a few days or a week of it being published. This allows us to act fast before significant damage has been done. When stolen content appears, we begin the anti-piracy process.
Automated Monitoring
DMCA Takedowns
This is the first step against piracy. As soon as comics are detected on pirate websites, we issue DMCA takedown notices to the web host, search engines, etc. Normally search engines will remove pirated content within a week. Image hosts and file lockers will remove links within 2-3 days. Torrents and pirate blogs are harder and normally do not respond to DMCA requests. During the entire process we document who responds and who does not respond to our DMCA takedown requests. When our requests are not honored we repeat them up to three times.
If after 3 notifications content has not been removed we begin preparing a new Federal Copyright Lawsuit. Filing a lawsuit is not only about recovering monetary damages. Many times pirates are located in developing countries where recovering damages would be difficult or impossible.
However, filing a federal lawsuit gives us subpoena power to find out why web hosts, search engines, or any other third parties (which are normally located in the United States) have ignored our notices or are assisting the pirate diffusing the content. Once they are notified that a federal lawsuit is underway, we normally receive immediate cooperation from third parties in removing pirated content.
Federal Copyright Lawsuits
Copyright FAQ
- You are! As your publisher, you license us the right to publish your comic online. We do not ask for print rights, movie or TV rights, or any other rights that we can’t immediately monetize.
- After we register your copyright, it will last for your lifetime plus 70 years.
- Check the master list of pirate websites in your author portal. If the site is listed, we already know about it and are monitoring it. However, if you’ve found a site that we don’t know about, report the exact URL that has your pirated comic to us. We will include the comic in our next round of DMCA takedowns and start monitoring the website.
- We have a three strike policy. We notify three times and then file a lawsuit.
- We do not notify you of our DMCA filings. We file thousands of these per month and we cannot notify each author of the enforcement action we are taking against every pirate website.
- Yes, we will notify you by email when we file a copyright lawsuit when your comic is involved. You do not need to do anything when we file a lawsuit. Our publishing agreement states that Botcomics is responsible for all copyright lawsuits, including attorneys fees.