Lamar Smith, author of SOPA, on being a copyright violator

The SOPA Act is a legal monstrosity supposedly designed to stop online piracy and to protect intellectual property. 

But....

The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for 10 such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

In other words, anyone bringing a frivolous lawsuit against, say, a political opponent or an unpopular opinion could get a site shut down for a long, long time. 

The bill was introduced by Texas Congressman Lamar Smith. 

This is where it gets good.  Delicious good.  Juicy good. 

Here's an old screen shot from Lamar Smith's website, compliments of a blog called Vice Beta. 

See the beautiful photo in the far margins?  It was taken by someone named DJ Shulte. 

Lamar Smith didn't credit Shulte for the photo. 

Here's Shulte, once again from Vice Beta:

"I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against http://www.texansforlamarsmith.com/."

Here's Vice Beta again:

We've contacted the office of Lamar Smith and are waiting on a response.

I was kinda curious myself, went to the Smith website and asked about the copyright violations on the website of the dude sponsoring the Draconian bill against copyright violations.  This is what I got:

“A past iteration of http://www.texansforlamarsmith.com/ was built by an independent contractor for the 2010 election cycle.
“Texans for Lamar Smith relied on that independent contractor to provide a product in keeping with all applicable laws, as the campaign does with all entities providing goods or services.
“Design, development and management of http://www.texansforlamarsmith.com/ was last October placed in the hands of a company that assures all images are being properly used.”

- Mike Asmus, manager
Texans for Lamar Smith

In other words, somebody else did it.  It's not Lamar Smith's fault.  But if you made the same mistake, Smith and Uncle Sam want to shut your ass down. 

Here's a link to the site of James Strohm, the Libertarian who I hope will run again for Smith's seat, just in case you want to send James some money.  

A Fresh Coat Of Whitening to the great Radley Balko for the first link.