Legal
Last updated
What comic-dl is, what it is for, and the legal terms for what you download with it.
On this page
What comic-dl is
comic-dl is a general-purpose downloader for comic and manga galleries. It reads the metadata and image links that a site’s own pages expose publicly, downloads the images, and packages them into CBZ, ZIP, and CBT archives. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by any of the sites it supports.
Use it for content you may access
Download only content you own, are authorized to download, or are otherwise legally permitted to access under the site’s terms and your local law. This page does not define what that is for you — your jurisdiction, the site’s terms, and the specific work all matter.
Copyright
Creating, retaining, or sharing offline copies of copyrighted content may infringe copyright, even if you can view the content online. Having saved a copy is not a defense to infringement. The substantial-non-infringing-uses doctrine shows why a tool like this one is not itself illegal, but it says nothing about whether any particular download by a user is legal; see Sony v. Universal (Betamax) and MGM v. Grokster (inducement).
Terms of service
Scraping and automation are frequently prohibited by a site’s terms of service even where they are not unlawful. Paywall bypass is not a supported use of comic-dl. Similar tools frame the same stance explicitly — see gallery-dl’s terms of service (“no paywall bypass”, user responsibility).
Access controls and the law
comic-dl does not bypass access controls by default: challenge solving is
opt-in (solver = "off"), and enabling a solver is an explicit choice per
run or in config. Circumventing technical protection measures can be
unlawful:
- In the US, the DMCA §1201 prohibits circumventing access controls — see the statute.
- Unauthorized access to a computer system can implicate the US CFAA.
- Other jurisdictions — including Japan, Korea, and the EU — have their own anti-circumvention and computer-access rules; they differ from the US.
How similar tools fared
- In 2020 GitHub reinstated youtube-dl after a DMCA §1201 takedown, concluding the tool had substantial non-infringing uses. See GitHub’s statement and the EFF’s analysis.
- GitHub’s own DMCA Takedown Policy explains how takedown notices and counter-notices work.
No warranty; user responsibility
comic-dl is licensed under the MIT license and provided “as is”. You are responsible for your use of it and for anything you download with it. The comic-dl developers are not responsible for user actions.
Support and takedown queries
Report bugs and request removal through the GitHub issue tracker. This document is informational, not legal advice, and the project maintainers are not your lawyers.
See also Privacy for what comic-dl stores on your machine.