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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!
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.
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.
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.