Slashdot Mirror
Judge Dismisses 'Inventor of Email' Lawsuit Against Techdirt (arstechnica.com)
A federal judge in Massachusetts has dismissed a libel lawsuit filed earlier this year against tech news website Techdirt. From a report: The claim was brought by Shiva Ayyadurai, who has controversially claimed that he invented e-mail in the late 1970s. Techdirt (and its founder and CEO, Mike Masnick) has been a longtime critic of Ayyadurai and institutions that have bought into his claims. "How The Guy Who Didn't Invent Email Got Memorialized In The Press & The Smithsonian As The Inventor Of Email," reads one Techdirt headline from 2012. One of Techdirt's commenters dubbed Ayyadurai a "liar" and a "charlatan," which partially fueled Ayyadurai's January 2017 libel lawsuit. In the Wednesday ruling, US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor found that because it is impossible to define precisely and specifically what e-mail is, Ayyadurai's "claim is incapable of being proved true or false."
And more importantly, he didn't invent e-mail.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
At times it's hard to tell whether Ayyadurai is just a liar, or if he really is out of his mind. I suspect he lies somewhere in between; that he started out peddling an inflated claim, and when called out on it, started getting more and more hyperbolic, in the hopes of shouting down critics. His statements on Tomlinson were absurd and hateful, particularly in light of the fact that the RFCs are all dated, so we have a very solid chronology of how ARPANET email evolved during the 1970s.
I think he's a litigious kook, or as we would have called him back in the day; a net kook.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.