bregel: Amazing parallels between his...

Amazing parallels between his abuse/control of copyright and those outed at gayhomophobe.com I’ll leave the catchy domain creation as an exercise for the reader.

vicemag:

After our blog post about SOPA author Lamar Smith’s unauthorised use of a copyrighted image on his official campaign website came out yesterday, Lamar’s site went down “for maintenance” for a while.

According to people who know more about this kinda thing than me, the above screenshot shows that, while the site was down, Lamar (or Lamar’s people) altered the “robots.txt” file on the site to prevent people from being able to view archived versions of the page. So what exactly was Lamar trying to hide?

Well, above is a screenshot of his site as it appeared the morning I wrote the blog. If you’ve been on his site since, you’ll notice that the banner has been changed (to an image from iStockphoto which, unless he’s a complete moron, he will have paid for) – so you have to assume that there was something in that banner he didn’t want us to see. Though the pictures are too cropped to reverse image search effectively, doing a quick Google Image Search turned this up:

The second image from the right on his banner is of the courthouse in San Marcos, Texas. The image Lamar’s site used is the first thing to come up If you Google Image Search “San Marcos Courthouse”.

And the image to the left of that is of Fred Street, in Fredrisckburg, TX. And hey, look what happens if you Google “Fred St, Fredricksburg, TX”!

There’s also this (unbelievably shitty) video that’s still on the homepage of his site.

The image of the Alamo used is the first usable image to come up if you google image search “the Alamo” (that other one that looks like a colour photo is actually a tiny GIF).

And the image of Fredericksburg’s Historic District is the first thing to come up if you search for “Fredericksburg Historic District”.

And lastly, San Marcos Courthouse is also referred to as “Hays County Courthouse”. Shockingly, the image used in the video of the courthouse appears in the first page of results when you do a search for “Hays County Courthouse”.

The other four images used in the banner/ video (two shots of Hill County, TX, another shot of The Alamo, and one of Austin, TX) didn’t come up when I did google-image-search-guesses.

I also tried tracing the images used back to the copyright owners to see how easy it would be to get legal clearance on them after finding them through Google, but was unable to do so for all but one of them.

Though I have no way of saying for sure that he stole these images from Google without getting the copyright holder’s permission in a “please please don’t sue me for libel Lamar” kinda way, the fact that five out of nine are things that came up on my first Google Image Search ain’t lookin’ great, is it Lamar?

-@JLCT

(this post was reblogged from bregel)

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