Turns out SOPA author Senator Lamar Smith violated the terms of his own bad legislation. His reelection campaign website (www.texansforlamarsmith.org) recently featured a background image illegally “pirated” from photographer DJ Schulte. Schulte posted the original image under a Creative Commons license requiring non-commercial users to attribute the image source when reposting. That didn’t happen. Don’t bother checking Smith’s site. The image has been removed.

There are lots of great articles about this. It seems that this article at vice.com started it all. Nice work!

I will support reasoned efforts to curtail blatant piracy and will line up behind attempts to help artists preserve the integrity of their own intellectual efforts. I can’t support SOPA. SOPA is written so broad it will further confuse people about what can and can’t be posted or published online. Our culture works through remix. We are constantly mixing ideas, writings and creative expressions into our own work to make something new. That’s called art. The web is really great for that. The so-called Stop Online Piracy Act is not about protecting copyright. It is about preserving corporate control over our own culture so that companies like Disney and Viacom can endlessly repackage and resell our own culture back to us over and over again.

Do not support this legislation. It is bad for artists. It is bad for Web users. It is bad for American culture. Find out more. Do something.