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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."
His claims were always far-fetched. Correctly he claims a copyright over a program called "EMAIL", however that does not mean he invented email itself which predates him by over a decade. In fact RFC 561 outlines standards for email headers 5 years before his program. As an analogy it would be like Microsoft claiming they invented spreadsheets because they came out with Excel. Lotus Corp and many others would dispute that claim.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Ayyadurai is right-wing, genius. They hate free speech at least as much as the left do.
Plaintiff defines "e-mail” to include features such as an inbox, outbox, folders, a “to:” line, a “from:” line, a “subject:” line, the body of the message and the ability to include attachments, and the ability to copy (“cc”) or blind copy (“bcc”) other recipients. (See Compl. 13). However, that is not the only definition. For example, the online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “e-mail” in far more general terms as “a means or system for transmitting messages electronically (as between two computers on a network.” E-mail, MERRIAM-WEBSTER, https://www.merriamwebster.com... (last visited Aug. 31, 2017). Similarly, in the context of a patent dispute, the Federal Circuit has held that “a person of ordinary skill in the art would have recognized that an electronic mail message must include a destination address and must have the capacity to include an address of an originating processor, message content (such as text or an attachment), and a subject.” In re NTP, Inc., 654 F.3d 1279, 1289 (Fed. Cir. 2011). Accordingly, whether plaintiff’s claim to have invented e-mail is “fake” depends upon the operative definition of “e-mail.” Because that definition does not have a single, objectively correct answer, the claim is incapable of being proved true or false.
Given that most messaging systems prior to any formalized RFCs would fall under some sort of "email" designation, it would be hard to prove that they are in fact the original "email" that was invented. What is clear would be that the plaintiff would not be the first.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.