The Author of SOPA Is Caught Violating a Copyright

Uh oh. Maybe the U.S. representative who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act should know better than to break the rules his law (if passed) would penalize him for. The intrepid Jamie Lee Curtis Taete of Vice magazine decided do some sleuthing into Rep. Lamar Smith's website to see if everything was on the up and up with the content he's posted online. And he did, to SOPA haters delight, find some suspect photographs: two stock images from a photographic agency and another landscape photograph by one DJ Schulte. In the case of those two stock images, that agency told Taete that "it's very difficult for them to actually check to see if someone has permission to use their images." So we'll give Rep. Smith the benefit of the doubt there. But in the case of that last photo, which Taete found on an old version of Smith's site using the Wayback Machine, photog Schulte says he didn't have any record of Smith asking to use it before he put the image in Creative Commons.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.