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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."
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."
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.