SOPA Backers Are Pirates Themselves

We all know how passionate politicians can get about intellectual property enforcement once they’ve been handed a couple nice checks from the entertainment industry. But Texas representative Lamar Smith, despite being the mastermind behind the wrecking ball-style internet copyright legislation known as SOPA, isn’t really all that gung-ho about respecting other people’s intellectual property rights otherwise. If he was, he probably would have had his people thoroughly check his own website to make sure he wasn’t using any copyrighted material. But alas, Jaime Taete over at our big sister VICE snooped around and found that even good ‘ol Lamar isn’t perfect when it comes to avoiding copyright violation under his own legislation.

Lamar is using several stock images on his site, two of which I tracked back to the same photographic agency. I contacted the agency to make sure he was paying to use them, but was told that it’s very difficult for them to actually check to see if someone has permission to use their images. (Great news, copyright violators!) However, seeing as they’re both from the same agency and are unwatermarked, it seems fairly likely that he is the only person on the entire internet who is actually paying to use a stock image (and he’d be an idiot not to).
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So I took a look back at an archived, pre-SOPA version of his site.

This is a screenshot of his site as it appeared on the 24th of July, 2011.

And this is the background image Lamar was using. I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it.
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And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.

Lamar isn’t the only copyright crusader in Congress refusing to play by his own rules: A website that tracks internet activity, youhavedownloaded.com, has detected more than 800 computers owned by members of Congress illegally downloading movies, music, TV shows, software and more in the past few months.

Things haven’t been squeaky-clean in the corporate anti-piracy camp either: Sony BMG, infamous for their overzealous anti-piracy campaigns that involved installing illegal rootkits via legally purchased CDs, was found to be running pirated software on their own systems back in 2008. I could go on.

Of course, Lamar’s stock photo snafu shouldn’t be any more a crime than a couple innocently posting YouTube videos of their baby dancing to pop tunes. But unfortunately the legislation he’s spearheading would see to it, because it refuses to recognize the reality that copyrighted material is everywhere on the ‘net. Perhaps if there were any effective means of viewing and tracking copyright (there aren’t, as the comment from the stock photo agency above illustrates) it would be easier to create, manage and use intellectual property without unintentionally creating a new criminal class of unwitting internet citizens. But in the meantime, Lamar, your colleagues having four torrented seasons of Breaking Bad on their PC desktops probably isn’t helping your case.

• The Desperate But Familiar Plot Behind Hollywood’s SOPA Opera
• Censored Internet? Build A New One In Space
• Break In Case of Censorship: What Are Our Free Speech Failsafes If SOPA Passes?
• Cory Doctorow on Why DRM Will Never Work