Texans, if you’re in the 21st District, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-is-for-rat—TX) is your copyright-violating critter. He’s also the one who introduced SOPA and, by the way, is up for reelection. I suggest voting against him even if his strongest or best opponent is a dead skunk TxDOT scraped off the highway.
According to Vice.com, the pre-SOPA version of Smith’s official campaign Web site included a background image that was not properly attributed to its creator per Creative Commons license. DJ Schulte, the photographer who took that gorgeous shot, confirms this:
Vice.com contacted me with evidence that Lamar Smith’s website www.texansforlamarsmith.com used my image as a background for their website. I have no recollection, nor record of Lamar Smith or anyone from his organization requesting permission to use my image “Mist Lifting Off Cedars”. That lack of request does not violate the Creative Commons license although it does show high disregard for creative material producers. What does violate my Creative Commons license though is that I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that the image was attributed to the source (me). It would seem this image was improperly used by the organization of the very author of the SOPA bill that is being debated in Congress.
Another, interesting allegation from Vice.com: somebody associated with Critter Smith took his site offline and updated the robots.txt file to disallow the Internet Archive that caches so much of the Internet’s content, including the old version of Smith’s site. Here’s a screen cap of the file (I took this one, for the record):
I believe the phrase we’re looking for is, “down the memory hole.” Too bad they didn’t get to this before Internet users started playing the, “How hypocritical are our hired help?” game. Whether or not Smith himself took any of the actions I’ve mentioned (he probably didn’t, as operating a computer requires a few brain cells more than the average, hired critter possesses), that’s his Web site and the people working on it answer to him. It’s no different than Ron Paul being responsible for his tinfoil-hat newsletters from before my time. Don’t want to be held accountable in these kinds of situations? Don’t put your name on things or, at the very least, closely supervise the people doing the actual work.
He ran against Rhett R Smith the last time. Rhett R Smith ran as Libertarian, who I voted for back when he was running against Lamar Smith. You might want to donate to Mr. Rhett R. Smith he will probally run against Lamar Smith as the Libertarian candidate. His office is walking distance from where I live!!! I can walk to his office in less than 30 minutes waiting for every walk signal. You could picked outthere on the sidewalk. His office building is right across the street from the smoke stack trailer in the old texaco parking lot. His other office is in Austin on Bee Caves road in the expensive West Lake Hills neighboorhood of Austin. Take Bus Route #30, depart Barton Creek Mall and walk down Walsh Tarlton southbound make left on Bee Caves keep walking a couple of miles, you will see it. On the left hand side.