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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."
For anybody interested, and for some Streisand-Effecting, here is the article in question: How The Guy Who Didn't Invent Email Got Memorialized In The Press & The Smithsonian As The Inventor Of Email.
Enjoy!
What's tricky is defining "invention".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For copyright infringement on the use of the word "Spam".
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."
It's not even an early implementation. Messaging had been around for two decades before he came along, and the initial RFCS laying out the basic features of the Internet mail system we know today were written up and implemented four or five years before his program. That he wrote an email system isn't in dispute, that had any influence on other mail systems, in particular ARPANET email networks, is the issue, and the answer is no, he inspired nothing, and until his absurd claims were made public, no one had any even heard of his software.
At best he's a fantasist, at worst he's a shameless liar trying to take credit for things he had nothing to do with.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf...
Network Working Group J. White
Request for Comments: 524 SRI-ARC
NIC: 17140 13 June 1973
A Proposed Mail Protocol
AUTHOR'S INTENT
This is the document I offered in (15146,) to write. It's a proposed
specification for handling mail in the Network -- a Mail Protocol....
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf...
RFC # 561 Abhay Bhushan (AKB) MIT-DMCG
NIC # 18516 Ken Pogran (KP) MIT-MULTICS
Ray Tomlinson (RST) BBN-TENEX
Jim White (JEW) SRI-ARC
5 September 73
Standardizing Network Mail Headers
One of the deficiences of the current FTP mail protocol is that
it makes no provision for the explicit specification of such
header information as author, title, and date. Many systems
send that information, but each in a different format. One
fairly serious result of this lack of standardization is that
it's next to impossible for a system or user program to
intelligently process incoming mail.
RFC 561 called for standardizing mail headers 5 years before Ayyadurai claimed he invented it. While email has never formally defined when it was first used in the 1960s, the different standards slowly evolved. This is why it's hard to pin down when or who invented email as it slowly became what it is with many refinements and contributors. Back then different computer systems used different protocols, etc.
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.
"These original messaging systems had widely different features and ran on systems that were incompatible with each other."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In 1981, MULTICS had e-mail which was separate from the instant messages. It was not limited to that machine, because I had to enable it for one of my students who used it to e-mail someone on another MULTICS system in Phoenix.
Fight Spammers!
So what? The standard for patentability is supposed to be manifold, and based both upon obviousness, and on public knowledge. Someone who creates a formalized, standards-based messaging program hasn't invented messaging, nor come up with the idea, if there were literally dozens of preexisting systems.
And how does your statement addresses the OP's point that "email" is easy to define? The judge in the case ruled that it wasn't easy to define as there were no standards as to what it was. Thus the ruling states it is legally impossible to prove the plaintiff "invented" email when no one can agree on what was defined as email back then. Judge Saylor does not need to rule on whether the claim that he invented it is true. As part of the libel lawsuit, the plaintiff must prove that the statements made by the defendant were false and that the defendant knew they were false. Since the plaintiff cannot prove that his claim was true (and the defendant cannot prove the claim was false), the defendant cannot be held for libel.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
no, I invented email, and so did my wife!
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
It is fascinating to go back and read about early computers - many of the things we take for granted today are things that at one time people had to sweat over and figure out. Things like interrupts and stacks. I used Multics many years ago. My recollection is that it is over-designed and quite complicated. Originally designed to run on expensive hardware. Unix was designed to run on what at the time was less expensive hardware (PDP 7 and then PDP 11).
Give the guy a little credit for creating a working email _system_ in an era where email hadn't proliferated very far
Define "proliferated very far". Many other computer systems had email systems. The problem back then is that theses systems didn't often communicate with each other. For example, ARPANET extended across the country by 1977 had email. This guy invented an email program that worked at one university from what I can tell.
"V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is not a member of the MIT faculty and did not invent email. In 1980 he created a small-scale electronic mail system used within University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, but this could not send messages outside the university and included no important features missing from earlier systems"
From what I know from him, he never claimed he created electronic messaging.
These are his claims. Judge for yourself.
He just thinks he created a more useful version of it and that the term email can be attributed to him. That's his opinion, so what?
Well he sued someone who disagrees with that opinion for libel. By your own argument should you sue someone for a different opinion? One of the things not mentioned is that he sued one of authors for re-posting comments from other users in an article. That's not remotely how libel should work.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The PLATO systems were using email, instant messaging, chat rooms, and blogs in the mid 70s (1976 for e-mail).
Along with, not much later, plasma display terminals and minimal graphics, a rudimentary GUI, and all of this getting leveraged not only for instructional courseware but games, games, games... I still play one...
Some of PLATO was shown to some guys from Xerox PARC. They knew what to do. Don Bitzer was so far ahead of the possible technology even money could not have helped. Ayyadurai should be spanked and sent to bed.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The amazing thing is, this guy seems smart and well spoken, why would he ruin his reputation by making easily disprovable claims over such a widely used and revered technology.
Because he wants money. Do you know any Indians?
Read the judgment. On your first question, no he didn't. Just looking at the RFCs pertaining to ARPANET message formatting and transmission prior to his program, you can see that pretty much the essentials of the email systems we use today were sketched out by the mid-70s, but in reality, there were many different mail systems dating back over a decade prior to RFC 561.
If there was an inventory of modern email, it would be Roy Tomlinson, he was the primary developer of RFC 561, but as he made clear over the years, he did not develop email at all, and it was a collective by many groups over several years. But I would credit Tomlinson as being one of the primary developers of the ARPANET network mail system, which is the direct ancestor of Internet email, the chief innovations coming after that time being UUCP and SMTP which standardized the means to of transmitting those messages between multiple servers on local and wide area networks. Ayyadurai had absolutely nothing to do with any of this work, and no one has produced even a hint that Tomlinson or any of the other developers of the ARPANET network mail system ever heard of him, or based any of their work off of anything he did.
He wrote a mail system used for a while at one institution. It was an evolutionary dead end that inspired no one, and the fact is that those features of "email" that Ayyadurai claims were his had already been designed and rolled out. He had nothing to do with the development of ARPANET/Internet email. Full stop.
The reality is that email, like so many aspects of modern computing, was developed multiple times and in multiple ways over the years, and even the mail system we know today was the collective work of multiple individuals, building on the basic mail systems found on mainframe systems in the late 60s and early 70s, with each new RFC adding, clarifying and standardizing email functionality. In a way, there was no inventory of email, no single person you can point at and say "he did it". That was the spirit of computing at the time, and indeed is the source of the open source philosophy we have today. Nobody was developing ARPANET email to gain fame and fortune, they were engineers identifying and solving problems.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
MULTICS had email in 1965. It was written by Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck, though it was designed a little earlier. The credit for coming up with the idea usually goes to Glenda Schroeder.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});