Techdirt Asks Judge To Dismiss Another Lawsuit By That Guy Who Didn't Invent Email (arstechnica.com)

Three months ago Shiva Ayyadurai won a $750,000 settlement from Gawker (after they'd already gone bankrupt). He'd argued Gawker defamed him by mocking Ayyadurai's claim he'd invented email, and now he's also suing Techdirt founder Michael Masnick -- who is not bankrupt, and is fighting back. Long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd quotes Ars Technica: In his motion, Masnick claims that Ayyadurai "is seeking to use the muzzle of a defamation action to silence those who question his claim to historical fame." He continues, "The 14 articles and 84 allegedly defamatory statements catalogued in the complaint all say essentially the same thing: that Defendants believe that because the critical elements of electronic mail were developed long before Ayyadurai's 1978 computer program, his claim to be the 'inventor of e-mail' is false"...

The motion skims the history of e-mail and points out that the well-known fields of e-mail messages, like "to," "from," "cc," "subject," "message," and "bcc," were used in ARPANET e-mail messages for years before Ayyadurai made his "EMAIL" program. Ayyadurai focuses on statements calling him a "fake," a "liar," or a "fraud" putting forth "bogus" claims. Masnick counters that such phrases are "rhetorical hyperbole" meant to express opinions and reminds the court that "[t]he law provides no redress for harsh name-calling."
The motion calls the lawsuit "a misbegotten effort to stifle historical debate, silence criticism, and chill others from continuing to question Ayyadurai's grandiose claims." Ray Tomlinson has been dead for less than a year, but in this fascinating 1998 article recalled testing the early email protocols in 1971, remembering that "Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP."

Comments

Prior art

[Maury Markowitz]

As far as I am aware, "666BOX" by IPSharp had all the features he's claimed and was first written in 1974. That is, to, cc, bcc, reply etc.

I'm sure others here can come up with other examples?

Re:Prior art

[MightyMartian]

Ray Tomlinson invented email if you're going to pick any single person who developed the email system we know today. Ayyadurai developed some dead end email system years after the header formats were developed for Arpanet email. Ayyadurai can try to sue people all he wants but a series of RFCs beginning with RFC 561 in 1973 laid out the Arpanet email system that we still use today (though the transmission protocols have evolved since the mid-70s). That's the most frustrating part of this fruitcake's claims, since one can delve into the RFCs from the early 70s onward and see how the Internet email system evolved as new features and logic were added.