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."

Comments

Here's the article...

[wardrich86]

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!

Re:Here's the article...

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re: Shiva Ayyadurai

[jcr]

And more importantly, he didn't invent e-mail.

-jcr

Re:No corrections?

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:What about UUCP and DECnet ?

[UnknowingFool]

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.