(flickr.com/rasamalai/5949864741/)

As Betabeat reported Tuesday, Flickr is making major changes--and apparently getting serious about protecting user copyright is among them. Late Friday VentureBeat published an exclusive on Flickr's new move to combat copyright infringement by Pinterest, the wildly popular darling of digital image curators everywhere:

The Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site has just added Pinterest's newly introduced do-not-pin code to all Flickr pages with copyrighted or protected images.

"Flickr has implemented the tag and it appears on all non-public/non-safe pages, as well as when a member has disabled sharing of their Flickr content," a Flickr representative confirmed to VentureBeat Friday.

Pinterest's "do-not-pin" code is the pin-board giant's effort toward combating what amounts to rampant copyright violations by site users, who can easily rip images from most sites with Pinterest's "Pin It" bookmarklet. If an image goes viral, a photographer's work can quickly be viewed by millions of Internet users--without author credit.

Flickr's efforts may ultimately be in vain. The Verge addressed Pinterest's growth versus its copyright problem earlier this week: "In the end, none of these copyright issues are likely to derail Pinterest's explosive growth — they may distract from it, and they may certainly lead to a lawsuit or two as the company learns what is and isn't acceptable usage of other people's content."

NO SOPA FOR YOU MR. SMITH.

Including, it would seem, his own.

One of VICE's reporters has taken note of Rep. Smith's website, which—in an earlier iteration—apparently used a background image of some lovely trees.

Which were borrowed without the permission of the image's copyright holder.

Who does not recall ever licensing them to Rep. Smith or his staff for Rep. Lamar's uses, or receiving credit for the images used.

I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it. And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.

I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organization, requesting permission to use it: "I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes."

VICE contacted Rep. Lamar's office and is waiting to hear back. By the standards of SOPA, Rep. Lamar's website could've been shut down (and theoretically, still could be) for being in violation of the law he helped draft. This is how utterly absurd the garbage pile of Hollywood-funded legislation that is SOPA actually, in practice, is.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek