Dude who claimed he invented email is told by judge: It's safe to say you didn't invent email A US district judge has dismissed the libel lawsuit entrepreneur Shiva Ayyadurai filed against bloggers who rubbished his claims he invented email. Judge Dennis Saylor ruled [PDF] on Wednesday that Techdirt posts that trashed Ayyadurai's claims of inventing an electronic message system we know today as email were covered by …
Judge : It's safe to say you didn't invent e-mail.
Plaintiff : What makes you so sure?
Judge : You're only 17 years old now.
Presumably in the case at point, the guy had legal representatives acting (supposedly) for him?
Isn't it about time that they themselves suffered greatly, significantly, when losing such frivolous cases? Like say a 12 month ban on bringing any more cases.
It just may cut down on the caseload.
It looks like he is appealing, so I suppose his lawyer has a holiday home to pay off, or expensive private school tuition to pay.
I think that's what is happening, but to be honest I dozed off reading the last sentence where the lawyer explained about false something and constitution something and whatever.
The guy deserves what he gets.
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I wouldn't consider the case vexatious or frivolous. The judge agreed that he had invented an email system, just that it wasn't the first, and not necessarily what anyone else would consider email we have today.
However, if the judge had said what we have now derived from that, he was first, then the statements against him would have been false, would have been libellous, would not have received first amendment protection, and he would have been entitled to damages.
There was legitimate disagreement and the court settled that. Exactly how it's meant to work.
If the court had considered it vexatious or frivolous they would have said so. Just because a ruling goes the way one always thought it should doesn't make it vexatious or frivolous.
@Jason Bloomberg " invented an email system" - All the judge agreed was that he wrote an email system not the he invented email. The judge noted that assigning appropriate credit to all who deserve it for email is not a trivial task. In essence, this issue in this case of invention is sufficiently murky that reasonable people often will often give credit to others for their more fundamental work on email systems. This clown refused to acknowledge that was significant prior art (including what many consider functioning email systems as we currently understand email) prior to his program. Techdirt's commentary noted there was significant prior art and they stated their belief his claims were BS as he did not invent email only built on what was there.
I see this bullshit all the time, mostly from Apple (or rather its starry-eyed fanbois, since I can't ever remember any statement from Apple claiming to have actually invented anything, although they are very fond of the word "innovate", which is supposedly a different concept - improving rather than creating).
And here it is again, this time some guy who merely "wrote a program", but who thinks that somehow qualifies as an "invention", because it's (correctly) protected by ... copyright, which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with invention.
Executive summary: Invention is the method, production is one implementation of that method.
Neither is ever entirely unique, but is merely the accretive result of existing works, which is then temporarily afforded state protection for the purpose of "promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts".
This is a privilege to induce participation (or more bluntly, a bribe), not any sort of moral entitlement (specifically because your work is merely the result of "standing on the shoulders of giants"), hence the temporary status.
Ayyadurai attorney Charles Harder is the same attorney who gained fame and fortune by suing media outlets large and small on behalf of Hulk Hogan, Melania Trump and other clients unhappy with their press clippings. He's the attorney who sued Gawker Media out of business.
As part of the financial settlements that accompanied the $135 million sale of Gawker Media’s assets to Univision in August 2016, Ayyadurai received $750,000 to drop his lawsuit against Gawker.
I think that's about the size of it.
Where I went to college writing email or chat programs was something of a competitive sport.
Is his name on the relevant IETF RFC's?
Thought not.
* A colossal tool
After Shiva got roundly criticized by any sane person for his ridiculous claim about inventing email, and after his brief marriage to former TV star Fran Drescher, he became a Trump acolyte and decided to run for Senate against Elizabeth Warren. He has no chance, but it gives him an opportunity to have a big campaign bus with his name on it parked in front of his Cambridge office, to go on right-wing media around the country, to collect campaign donations from banksters and others who don't like consumer advocate Warren, and to keep the unspent campaign money when he loses (Massachusetts is pretty lenient in that regard).
In other words, keep grifting.
I do note, however, that US libel law makes it harder to sue for libel if you're a "public figure". If you are running for high office, you probably have become a public figure. I am aware of a man whose ex-wife's divorce lawyer wrote and self-published a *hilarious* philippic against him when he put his name on the New Hampshire primary ballot for Vice President (which takes negligible effort). This made him a public figure and he could then only sue if the book contained "actual malice" (knowledge that it was false). Hence he opened himself to the book and could do nothing about it.
If Shiva wants to sue anyone who calls him out now, he has to pass a higher hurdle than before.
Your current POTUS is a very strong argument against that you want only the best liars. He is a very skilled demagogue, but a shitty liar in that his lies are easily spotted. Of course, if the quality of a liar is decided on the quantity of lies, he is a splendid liar indeed.
The problem isn't that OPOTUS lies, it is that he believes everything he's told by his go-to advisors without fact-checking.
When the outright lies are mixed in with falsehoods he genuinely believes in and dubious stuff he thinks isn't important enough to get right first time, no-one can trust a single thing he says.
Hence "his lips are moving".
I don't think that Gore ever claimed to have invented the Internet, he said that he made the Internet possible by promoting the central communications backbone in the US - prior to that, it was a major effort just to find an account that I could connect my 110 baud modem to and receive anything back except #$^TRY&&#!#
"I don't think that Gore ever claimed to have invented the Internet,"
You're right, he never claimed that. He said something about how he was proud to have been instrumental in passing the bill that provided funding that helped "create" the internet. He was referring to the 1991 High-Performance Computing and Communications Act (generally known as the Gore bill according to sources such as the Washington Post). Everybody who wasn't trying deliberately to misread the quote in order to rev up know-nothing Fox News viewers knew that's what he was talking about.
"and the guy who invented the Internet!". Now, now, no pork pies (lies). The original project that started what is now known as the Internet was invented by the US Department of Defense, with the establishment of the DARPA network, over 50 years ago. It included places like the Goddard Space Center, and many of the then most powerful known computers in the world.
Debunked above....Al Gore didn't 'invent' the Internet, he was instrumental in *financing* it. I thought we'd passed that stage of deliberately misreading soundbites.
He didn't even *finance* (with other people's money, mind you) the "internet" (as it already existed 20-something years), but rather pushed through a bill for the enhancement and extension of an ALREADY EXISTING system. Progressives LOVE to take credit for everything but being the arrogant dimwitted weenies they are.
I described, in 33 handwritten pages of notes, a scheme whereby documents, pictures and executable scripts could be interlinked on multiple networked computers. I wrote the code and demonstrated a beta version of it to colleagues. This was back in 1985. I am pretty sure I invented the web. I need to sue someone. I keep hearing about Tim Berners-Lee. Can I sue him?
You kid, but I wrote a website (still have all the code floating around on an old disk somewhere) that transformed closed nit group forum software into a more open and shared experience, allowing direct messaging and self profiles where you can share details of yourself and pictures.
We know a similar thing today as Facebook.
I am not suing Facebook, many people have similar ideas, those that press on with them, preserve and build the monoliths are welcome to the fruits of their labours, whilst me dicking around with a few mates online can disappear into the obscurity where it mostly lived..
@Sampler - So you invented social networking for lice, when previously they could only network before they hatched? I never realised.
Nit - the egg of a louse or other parasitic insect.
Close-knit - bound together by strong relationships and common interests.
And now a need a shower.
I’m only kidding about the suing of Tim Berners-Lee. i actually did write the notes out and code the project demo, in my Denver apartment, in 1985. The thing is, like this E-Mail case, lots of people were doing lots of things similar to my distributed, hyperlinked document tree, and my project had nothing to do with development of what we know as the web today.
OK, I'll bite...
Don't blame the lawyers - it's this guy and his ego that are the problem.
The thing is, he seems to genuinely believe he is right - and, if instead this was some plucky underdog taking on Outlook, we'd be probably cheering him (and by extension his lawyers) on.
Everyone should be entitled to legal representation to argue for what they believe is right, whether they are accusing or defending. Unfortunately, 'everyone' encompasses a lot of assholes. But that's not the lawyer's fault.
That said, there is something about the total lack of self reflection within the American psyche that makes some of this US lawyer's comments cringe-worthy...
@d97402
"This was back in 1985. I am pretty sure I invented the web. I need to sue someone."
I think you'll find that neither you or Tim Berners-Lee invented the net, it was British Telecom as they invented the hyperlink
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/06/20/bt_invented_hyperlinks_shock/
Of course I didn’t invent the web. My facetious post was intended to make the point that neither did the complainant in the E-Mail case invent email. My project was interesting but went nowhere and was an interesting college comp-sci project, at best. It is just amazing how far obviously frivolous lawsuits can get in this county.
if we could close down half of the law schools and re-open them as med schools we’d be a lot better off.
"I am pretty sure I invented the web. I need to sue someone. I keep hearing about Tim Berners-Lee. Can I sue him?"
Yes. Yes you can.
A warning.
It's Sir Berners-Lee now. 'Sir' is a title given to knights. Knights have swords. You have, what, a keyboard? While some claim that the pen is mightier than the sword, this is generally disproved in combat. And a keyboard isn't even as mighty as a pen. So I don't hold out much hope for your chances.
Calm down dear, you're making a lot of incorrect assumptions in just one short paragraph.
1) Illegal is the wrong word, this was a civil case. Just because it is legal to say something, doesn't mean that you can't be sued. Indeed, in the US there's very little speech that is illegal, but the yanks always seem to be suing each other.
2) He was arguing that Techdirt saying that he did not invent email was in fact harming him (presumably because he uses that claim to drum up business). Deciding if it was in fact harmful or not was one of the things that the court case was about.
3) Generally, if you are sent to jail, it's because the government, in the form of a judge and jury, have decided that it is true that you have committed a crime, and you are sent to jail. If the charges are false, you're not.
A quick search on Shiva Ayyadurai quickly reveals how scummy his claims for inventing e-mail is. He claims to have invented it in 1978, but the first email client was invented in 1971/1972 by Ray Tomlinson. So what did Shiva invent? Nothing, he just made a program that did which has already done and claimed adding some functionality means he invented it... clear lie.
He also tried to sue Gawker when they called him out as a fraud. There is nothing significant or notable about Shiva Ayyadurai's claims around e-mail other than him suing anybody that calls him out on clearly having not invented email. I'm expecting a call from a lawyer any second now...
If you repeat something enough times people will start believing you. That's the only think his claim is based on. Even at the time he wrote his program, similar programs were already available. There is no fact behind his claims, just repeated claims. He uses methods commonly used in confidence scams.
I forgot to add, I think immigration is not a problem. I also think that in our circles, that is consensual as we all know our ancestors came from Africa anyway ... as for his alternative reality, well ... he was 14 when he implemented a messaging solution and thus has earned some arrogance, however, SMTP/POP/IMAP are the foundation of our email technology, ARE NOT his brain-child, nor an evolution of his solution ... I rest my case, as the judge did.
Please Ayyadurai, STFU, thank you.
I think all that truthfully said about Shiva Ayyadurai's claim is:
In the late 70s he developed an electronic office communication system which he called EMAIL.
He applied a skeumorphic transformation of real-world concepts (In Box, Out Box, CC, BCC, etc) to his system.
However, I don't think he can truthfully claim to have invented THE email we use today - which evolved from a completely different set of technologies.
He can claim he invented AN email system, but not THE email system (especially since electronic communications predates his invention).
At best, his was an independently conceived and implemented evolutionary dead end, which probably saw itself as a closed, rather than open, system.
Perhaps the only thing he can truly be credited for is EMAIL (unless there is evidence of earlier use of the term).
I think the point is that he didn't invent anything. He implemented an existing standard to create a program that could send an email.
Implementation != invention.
I have written a very simple program that sent SMS texts to a SMS gateway when this stuff was somewhat newish. 2 entry boxes (to & content) with a 160 character limit. And a counter to show how many characters you had left, and a print button. Simple, but effective and it stayed in use for something like a decade. Doesn't mean I invented SMS. If I had of done then i'd have implemented a better queing system and failure notification for starters.
except a phone call and an email are not zero-sum activities.
An email:
can be sent at the convenience of the sender (no having to wait to speak to someone)
can contain precise details of the issue in a handy copy-n-paste format
can contain attachments
can be dealt with at the convenience of the recipient
can be passed around internally in complex discussions
requires very little additional auditing
A phone call:
has none of the above
"The strength of mail by carrier pigeon is that the message is supplied along with a tasty treat."
OTOH, given that you have to supply the pigeon you might wish to forgo the treat. Shooting the messenger is one thing, eating it, especially when it's your own messenger, is another.
BTW The big weakness is the difficulty of supplying the pigeons to people who might wish to correspond with you.
"
A phone call:
has none of the above
"
Horses for courses.
You cannot beat a live conversation when it comes to discussing a complex issue, and such discussions are a lot faster when they involve voice communication than when they are conducted textually.
As just one example, think of discussing a medical issue with a doctor so that the doctor ends up with a reasonable diagnoses. Each answer to a question provokes a new question that is based upon the previous answer. This would require many rounds of emails, but could be achieved in a single fairly short discussion.
When the wife worked at a restaurant, and I used to dabble in coding the sinclair spectrum, I recreated her till (just for the fun of it). At they time they used fobs to sign in. So I did a slide to sign in at the bottom of the screen using a joystick and button (no mouse and the TV wasn't touch screen!!)
Wish I kept all of that, could be worth zillions now
"The public, and the courts, should not tolerate false speech, particularly when it causes people harm, and irresponsible media companies should stop using the Constitution as an excuse for their reckless dissemination of false information."
Mr President, consider yourself chastised.
Sorry, your orangeness, "chastised" means "told off".
.....will statistically type every combination of letters available however when they type a pattern that is already used to refer to an existing system it doesn't mean they get to claim they invented it.
Hes said he created a program called EMAIL in 1978, fair enough but wiki says SMTP has been about since 1971 when he would have been 7seven years old.
A seven year old contributing to the SMTP messaging system would surely have been news at the time and remembered.
It used to be that you could only rewrite history after killing everyone who might disagree, now they just go to court instead it seems.
"A seven year old contributing to the SMTP messaging system would surely have been news at the time and remembered."
I dunno - RFC821 was spectacularly simple. A bright 7-year-old using the IRC name "OldD00d1964" could have helped. After all, my son seems to know everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) about Nintendo...
Back in 1991-ish I created a multiuser chat program for computer class (no network save a shared floppy drive... oh the noises it made when running the chat). It mimicked the local multi-line BBS I was a member of at the time. Was before I knew of the Internet, That said I'm not going around telling people I created IRC or ICQ or AIM or Instant Messaging in general.
Sometime around 2006 I had an idea for a micro blogging service which one could update via SMS texts. Built a crude prototype on my home server. Didn't do anything more with it. I'm not going to claim to have invented Twitter.
Pffft, in 1986/1987, I hacked together a simple chat program on the BBC computers using the local econet network, which was considered especially cool as it could span the bridges and talk to other econet networks in the other classrooms.
I kept calling it a crap piece of code, but it took off in the school, and became known as "crappy-chat". It behaved more or less like a more simple irc.
Even then, I couldn't take credit. A friend who had used online services (I hadn't at that point) told me that a "chat program between classrooms would be cool".
I had to ask him what he meant by a chat program, as I hadn't heard of them!
Neither of us ever claimed to have invented anything.
Damn you J.G! You beat my post by seconds...
I guess you can sue me for prior art now.
Interesting screenshots, though! How did you get them?
I dumped all my econet hacking stuff to 5 1/4 inch floppy before leaving school, and have never accessed them since. I know where they are still - in a draw in a cupboard in my old bedroom at my parents house. They haven't been touched in 30 years. I wonder if they are still readable, and what I could use to read them?
I got the screenshot by *SPOOLing a few minutes in TALK while jumping between machines typing at them, then copying the file over to my PC, running BeebEm and *PRINTing the file, then taking a screen copy.
If it wasn't in MODE 7 I could have *BMPSave'd directly from the Beeb, but I haven't finished the MODE 7 conversion code.
And I've just checked my documentation for TALK, and the first working version was in Spring 1983! :)
We've all had little flashes of brilliance, some of us have worked on them and abandoned them. Over the last 35 years of working in IT I'm sure I'm invented some stuff that no one else thought of, but like most I had a real life to get on with and dead-end code is dead-end code.
Unless I have 100% proof that what I built was valid, usable and went into production of some sort, I'm not going to bother wasting my time suing someone else who may have come up with a similar idea to me at the same time but they had the balls to go out and turn into something truly workable and even financially beneficial.
"We've all had little flashes of brilliance, some of us have worked on them and abandoned them. Over the last 35 years of working in IT I'm sure I'm invented some stuff that no one else thought of"
This is the essence of programming. You're presented with a problem and you invent stuff to solve it. The core of programming patterns was the realisation that in general programmers (or, as the law calls them, persons skilled in the art), faced with a given problem, will produce similar inventions.
This should set a bar for claiming a patentable invention: it should be demonstrable that the problem has been recognised for some time and acknowledged to have not had a solution. Only in that way does it become clear that the level of originality in the invention exceeds that expected of persons skilled in the art.
I suppose one of the few examples of this is HTTP/HTTPL. It should also be salutary to realise that it wasn't simply the invention itself that made the web successful; it was making it freely available. Without that it would have had as little effect as the patent of BTs which seems to have simply sat on the shelf until someone decided to try to use it to cash in on other people's work in producing working code.
I'm the low-caste, dark-skinned, Indian, who DID invent #email. Not Raytheon, who profits for war & death.Their mascot Tomlinson dies a liar
Interesting point. I wonder if he's being driven by imagining prejudice against him for being low caste when nobody in the West cares?
Back in the early 80s the plant manager at Leyland in Madras, if I remember rightly, was low caste but took enormous joy out of being able to sit at lunch eating meat while his high-caste reports had to sit around and watch. I do admire that kind of chutzpah.
So he's claiming to have invented email based on a system he wrote in 1978......when email in a form recognizable as such by modern users has been around since 1973...and then slamming people for "false speech" for calling him out on it.
I believe the appropriate phrase from modern yoof culture would be "GTFO".
So, one party says another part wrote bad things about them that were false and damaging, so they go to court to seek redress.
This sounds to me like a simple case of supposed libel.
That doesn't make it a free-speech rights issue, and even worse, it has sod all to do with the government, and therefore sod all to do with the first amendment.
Nobody wrote false and damaging stuff about Shiva. True and damaging, sure, but under American law (thanks to the First Amendment, which brought about this distinction from British law, which we inherited), truth is an absolute defense against libel.
Leon Uris wrote the novel QB VII about a libel case in England brought by an exposed Nazi. Spoiler: The court found for the Nazi, because the true statements harmed him, and awarded him damages of one whole pound.
As I understand it, if you can prove the truth of your statements, it's not libel. Even if it harms someone's reputation. The problem is where you can't. In England and Wales (Scotland has a different legal system) you can allege something you believe to be true, but if you can't prove it to the jury's satisfaction - then you lose. And the burden of proof is on you, the defendant, which is unusual compared with most other types of case. So Private Eye lost to Robert Maxwell about his theft of company money, because they had the right inside info, but were unable to prove it. And even after his death, and wrongdoing became public knowledge, I seem to remember they tried to recover their libel loss from his estate and still didn't get it.
The US is different. It's not truth that the Constitution protects, it's freedom of speech. And I think the US leans far more towards fair comment. If you weren't publishing it maliciously and you sincerely believed it to be true, and had actually done some checking, then you don't have to prove your allegations to the civil court standard of "in the balance of probabilities". Criminal standard being "beyond reasonable doubt", of course.
The First Amendment literally says that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Accordingly, Congressional laws against slander and libel can only be enforced insofar as they do not abridge freedom speech or of the press. Accordingly, every single claim made under the slander and libel laws has to be evaluated as to whether enforcement of the claim would abridge either of those freedoms. If it would, the law against slander/libel is unconstitutional, and therefore the law is null, and thus the claim of slander or libel is null.
Email in one form or another has been around since the 1960's (then is was to users on the same computer). It did take a while to get from machine to machine, but there it was.
Anyone can implement and email program (I thought about at one time, but passed), and call it "EMAIL". I'm sure many have done so. Not very unique.
Invention implies "new and novel". I suspect that this chap has done neither.
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