Two bills — SOPA, and PIPA — both purport to shore up copyright law and end online piracy. They were written by content industry lobbyists with no input from the technology industry. As a result, as written they would place overly broad powers in the hands of content owners — those same content owners have already proved to be unworthy of the more basic trusts afforded them with the DMCA. More, these bills meddle with the fabric of the Internet — with DNS, with linking and embedding of content, with Fair Use.

Free, unabridged speech and the robust exchange of ideas on the Internet has become central to my every day life: my work experience, my ability to write, to create, to share neat stuff I’ve found online with friends, family and wide-ranging communities of interest. It’s become ever more important to how we get our news, and shapes our political process. Inhibiting speech in the pursuit of commercial interests is wrong. Congress shall make no law abridging the rights of free speech… no matter how much the lobbyists pay them.

As Terry’s likely to turn out a crowd, the folks at Flying Pig are kindly requesting you let them know you’re coming — RSVP by phone at 802-985-3999 or by email at flyingpigevents@gmail.com — so they’ll know if they need to have overflow space for you and that towering stack of books you want signed.

Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea for eBooks. He had been granted access to significant computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to be Hart’s life’s work, spanning over 40 years.

Hart was an ardent technologist and futurist. A lifetime tinkerer, he acquired hands-on expertise with the technologies of the day: radio, hi-fi stereo, video equipment, and of course computers. He constantly looked into the future, to anticipate technological advances. One of his favorite speculations was that someday, everyone would be able to have their own copy of the Project Gutenberg collection or whatever subset desired. This vision came true, thanks to the advent of large inexpensive computer disk drives, and to the ubiquity of portable mobile devices, such as cell phones.

It wasn’t technology alone that brought about Hart’s vision, of course, but his own passion. He should be remembered for his work in the cause of literacy and the protections of the public domain. And for a vast, free and freely accessible library.

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

• From Phil Plait’s awesome Bad Astronomy blog, Bill Nye (The Science Guy) contrives a sundial at Cornell University that glows when the Sun reaches its daily peak in the sky.
• SF Signal unearths a spiffy, vintage vid’ of Arthur C. Clarke on the challenges of predicting the future. (He would know!)
• Jeff Vandermeer interviews Mur Lafferty on her new Afterlife ebook novella series. (I’m a fan of Mur’s I Should Be Writing podcast.)
• Annabel Pitcher writes in defense of Dumbledore at The Guardian after Severus Snape is voted the most popular Potterverse character.
• Finally, via Io9, while the myth of the tongue taste map has been put to rest, is there another taste map — a real one — in your brain?

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers.

2001: A Space Odyssey's Tablet Computer

Certainly there’s an Apple-esque minimalism at play here. Note the generous bezel around the screen, and the controls (teeny enough that you can’t actually see them in this image) reside at the bottom edge of the bezel. It’s a pity that in the only capture I can find it would appear that our intrepid astronauts are merely watching a video broadcast, and not, perhaps, playing Angry Birds (which is of course what they’d surely prefer to do, but voyaging through space is serious business.) More’s the pity that the tablet in the film bears the label, IBM.

Dune's Tablet Computer

But why stop there? Kubrick may have been the first, but his has hardly been the only on-screen vision of tablet computers. There’s the relatively bulky (by today’s standards, anyway) tablet that made its appearance in David Lynch’s version of Dune.

And of course, there’s the slim and styling tablet which saw regular use on Star Trek — TNG, DS9, take your pick — for which I would have at the time traded certain, let’s say vestigial parts of my anatomy. And for Gene Roddenberry’s sake, let us not forget the original series’ tricorder.

Star Trek's Tablet Computer

Harumph.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that SciFi has been used as the basis for prior art. Science Fiction giant Robert Heinlein described the attributes of a waterbed so precisely and thoroughly in his writings that the USPTO denied entrepreneur Charles Hall a patent in 1968, citing Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Other decisions haven’t been quite so decisive. Frederik Pohl described voice mail, voice dialing, virtual reality, online job searches and virtual keyboards in a single work, 1969′s The Age of the Pussyfoot, and none of his work has been successfully referenced as prior art. Such is the caprice of the  US Patent and Trademark Office.

All of this overlooks the very interesting aspect of Apple’s beef with Samsung, and that’s the pointed fact that if you look at Samsung’s telephones and tablet offerings before the iPhone and iPad, and look at them after, there’s a pretty spooky similarity each for the other in terms of  its look and feel, or its “trade dress.” And there’s no cinematic deux ex machina to help Samsung litigate that.

Before & After. AppleInsider Image -- www.appleinsider.com