In an interesting wrinkle, Vice may have uncovered a copyright violation on Smith's own site. An old version of Texans For Lamar Smith, Smith's campaign website, apparently used a background image licensed under Creative Commons on the condition that the creator be attributed. Vice says it was unable to find attribution, and the photographer confirmed that Smith had never contacted him to use the image under other conditions, although it's always possible there was attribution in the metadata or somewhere else. When we tried to confirm, however, we discovered that the site had started using robots.txt to block archiving, something that wasn't in place when Vice wrote the article. If the image wasn't attributed, it may well have been an honest mistake — but SOPA's provisions could mean that foreign sites that make the same one would face disproportionately harsh penalties.