
History by lawsuit: the “inventor of e-mail” targets Techdirt - ojbyrne
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-mans-quest-to-convince-the-world-that-he-invented-e-mail/
======
memracom
In 1974 I started Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada,
and I got my first email accounts (plural) on various timesharing systems. The
one that I used most was on a Honeywell 6050 TSS system (we called that one
Honeybun, or the 'bun for short) and using the campus comms network, we would
login to check email from several buildings on campus, many times a day. That
comms network also allowed dialup modem access using acoustic couplers and I
remember one department that had a TI Silent 700 terminal with acoustic
coupler and modem, specifically so that they could connect to the 'bun.

And the IBM VM 370/CMS system also had email. People on that system developed
a way to interconnect mainframes across the globe using a system called BITNET
that was an email predecessor of the Internet proper.

On the 'bun we had the MAIL command which was either part of Honeywell's GCOS
TSS or perhaps was one of the enhancements that we got from Bell Labs. When
the University started setting up UNIX systems using the software from BELL
Labs, we interconnected the UNIX email systems with the 'bun. Then by 1976
Waterloo folk had built an enhanced email system call Space Mail (because the
command to invoke it was to type one space by MAIL) which had almost all the
features of modern email systems such as revoking a message that you had sent
by deleting it from the recipient's mailbox.

I suspect that no single person invented email. We lived in a world surrounded
by paper mail delivery systems so at the earliest possible moment, anyone who
could, was writing code to emulate mail systems in the computer. It's that
simple.

~~~
criddell
I always thought the various email-related RFC's pretty much destroyed
Ayyadurai claim.

For example,
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc561](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc561) is
from 1973.

------
rectang
For the sake of historical accuracy, and for the sake of honest journalism,
this lawsuit needs to bedecided in favor of Techdirt and to impose no
financial hardship on Techdirt.

Ideally, Ayyadurai would be ruined as well -- as a cautionary tale for other
miscreants.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Ideally, Ayyadurai would be ruined as well_

Paying the other side's legal fees is enough. The problem with injecting
vengeance under a veneer of deterrence into the justice system is it dissuades
honest suits. The risk of being "right" but not legally correct (per the
court's interpretation) becomes too great.

~~~
qq66
There is plenty of good precedent for allowing countersuits in cases of
frivolous litigation.

~~~
bsder
Not really. The bar is remarkably high, and judges are very reluctant to throw
around substantive penalties.

The real solution is to force the lawyers to bear some of the burden when they
lose. As it stands, the lawyers win regardless of how good or bad their case
was.

~~~
JoBrad
Wouldn't that just discourage lawyers from taking cases that might not win?

~~~
bsder
As opposed to right now where they will happily take even completely lost
cases as long as they get paid? I'll take that risk, thanks.

First, I'm not talking about criminal cases. I'm a firm believer that someone
defending against a criminal conviction needs every single advantage they can
get. The government is a well-funded, implacable enemy and you need every bit
of help to fight it if you are innocent.

However, I have been part of several civil cases where the judge has basically
said "I have rarely seen such horrific behavior from both client and lawyer--I
have no real penalty sufficient that I can impose." And this was after the
lawyer was blowing off _court imposed_ deadlines and fines.

The American civil legal system is set up for "the truth is somewhere in the
middle even if it skews to one side or another." When you have genuinely bad
actors on one side, it can be abused very badly, and it doesn't have very good
self-correction.

------
chrismcb
I hate that he tries to play the victim card. He claims people don't want to
agree with him because he is a lower class "brown" person and did the work as
a 14 year old. People don't believe him, because he is just plain wrong. It
has nothing to do with his age not heritage. And there is plenty of evidence
to suggest he is wrong.

------
drtillberg
The August 1982 registration discussed in the article was entitled "Computer
program for electronic mail system." There are many subsequent registrations
for things named "email." The copyright office catalog has 1977 registrations
for a newsletter about "electronic mail & message systems" ("covering
technology, user, product and legislative trends in graphic and record
communications.") There is a 1979 registration for a book about "The
Electronic mail market in Europe" and another for "Electronic mail in the
1980’s."

------
drtillberg
The individual that is the subject of the article is mixing terms, which is
curious for one with ready access to counsel. A "copyright" registration does
not indicate that one is an "inventor." One way to look at his omission to try
to enjoin all from using the term "e-mail," is as an admission that the word
was incidental to the registration, is and was not protected, and that it
never mattered for the registration whether his use of the word was original.

Brings to mind mismarking of products as being subject to patent protection,
which, of course, is against the law. Would be just charmed to see an
extension of those principles to improper assertions of copyright protection.

------
zackbloom
I personally traced the history of email back to at least 1971:
[https://eager.io/blog/history-of-email/](https://eager.io/blog/history-of-
email/)

After writing that someone let me know about this guy and his claims, and I
think I added a somewhat flippant section on it. Of all the people who might
have 'invented' email, it certainly wasn't him.

~~~
Stratoscope
It's so weird that this guy thinks he invented email in 1982. I wrote one of
the first email programs for PC-DOS in 1982 [1] [2], and we certainly didn't
think we were "inventing" email. As you note in your article, it had been
around for years! (We called it "electronic mail" back then.)

The only novel things about our program were:

1\. It used a graphical user interface built with the character mode graphics
on the IBM Monochrome Display.

2\. We had the ability to connect to multiple email services using a scripting
language, along with point-to-point dial-up connections to other users of our
program.

But the email services we connected to had been around for quite a while
before that. How else would we have gotten the idea of connecting to them -
and more than one of them?

We had definitely never heard of this guy and his EMAIL program!

[1] [https://archive.org/stream/byte-
magazine-1983-11-rescan/1983...](https://archive.org/stream/byte-
magazine-1983-11-rescan/1983_11_BYTE_08-11_Inside_the_IBM_PC#page/n199/mode/2up)

[2]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=6i8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA28&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=6i8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28#v=onepage&q&f=false)

The references are from 1983, but we were working on the program though most
of 1982.

------
kstenerud
It's unfortunate, but he's not actually trying to scam anyone. He truly
believes that he invented email. Furthermore, he has become paranoid in the
belief that there is a huge conspiracy to discredit him.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _he 's not actually trying to scam anyone_

Consider replacing "actually" with "intentionally"? He's actually trying to
sell a lie. Whether he knows it's a lie might be another matter, and I'll
grant you the benefit of doubt around his delusion.

~~~
criddell
Try this:

Go to Google and ask it "who invented email".

Interestingly, Bing gives a different answer.

~~~
Taniwha
remember if you find that an answer that google finds is misleading or
inaccurate there's a box right there you can click to provide feedback

~~~
criddell
If you go to do that, they tell you your input won't affect the ranking of any
page. So what's the point of giving feedback?

~~~
effie
There is no direct effect on rankings of any page because bad search result
does not necessarily mean the web page is bad. Also it is dangerous to leave
users affect the results in such a simple way. The point of giving feedback is
to help the search team improve their algorithms.

------
pbhjpbhj
>Gawker paid Ayyadurai $750,000 to settle all claims //

Why? It says they were already battered from another lawsuit, I don't see why
that means you should make a pay out to someone else who's lying; what
specific claims had Gawker made that were supposedly false?

It keeps saying in the article this charlatan demands recognition. He appears
to think having a copyright in a 40 y.o. program listing gives him a current
patent?? Supposing he had invented email there seems no legal basis to give
him any credit at all.

Ars were hella careful to give the false claims the last word.

~~~
Taniwha
If I were Gawker and going under because a predatory billionaire was going
after me I'd throw as much money in other directions as possible as the ship
sunk too.

------
greggh
I felt like I had won something when he got so sick of me telling the truth on
Twitter that he blocked me.

He did not invent email as we know it today. He copywrited a term that
described something people had already been doing for many years. That is not
invention.

~~~
teddyh
There’s no such word as “copywrited”. The closest word is “copyrighted”, but
you can’t copyright a term. You can get a _trademark_ for a term, but it seems
that’s not what this is about either.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
"copywrited" is pretty understandable and definitely a word, it may not be a
mainstream dictionary word however.

A section of text produced by a copywriter has been "copywrited". It's ugly
and unnecessary use of language IMO, I side with
[https://www.rensch.com/copywrite.html](https://www.rensch.com/copywrite.html)
more.

It has nothing whatever to do with intellectual property _rights_ however.

~~~
jcranmer
Given that the past participle of "write" is "written" and the preterite is
"wrote", the forms of "copywrite" should be "copywrote" and "copywritten", not
"copywrited."

~~~
stevekemp
That seems logical, unfortunately the only response which can be made is
"English is weird".

(Though people do try to generalise rules like this, I see a lot of foreigners
try to write "payed" instead of "paid". Similar idea, and equally logical.)

------
gerdesj
Well t'internet continues to be disruptive. This seems to be the opposite of
eg vacuum cleaners being referred to as Hoovers or ball point pens as Biros.

RFC 822 does not use the term email (nor does RFC 733) and yet I'm fairly sure
(I was was only 12 in 1982) that email (e-mail and others) was a regularly
used term back then for several message types that involved computers.

A copyright enforcement in just the US does not rewrite history.

~~~
jcranmer
RFC 822 and RFC 733 use "electronic mail", which is clearly meant to be the
same term as e-mail and email.

The point about "I got a copyright for EMAIL, therefore the US government
recognized me as the inventor of email" belies either a fundamental
misunderstanding of what copyright is and isn't or a malicious attempt to
deceive and defraud.

~~~
sowbug
It's not just a misunderstanding of copyright itself, but also a
misunderstanding of what copyright registration means. US copyrights have been
automatic since 1978: [https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-
general.html#register](https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-
general.html#register). You get it the moment you write something down on
paper, or otherwise "fix [it] in a tangible medium." He is probably talking
about copyright registration, which is a requirement before suing someone in
the US for infringement. It's just a rubber stamp.

------
Frenchgeek
So his claim is entirely based on the fact he copyrighted a program he called
"email" and the usual redefinition of terms and playing the victim?

And his father is a black belt in ikebana and will beat us up if we don't
agree, I guess...

~~~
baudehlo
Correct. And that despite not having anything to do with what we now call
email, he copyrighted his program. So despite people using the term before his
program, owning the copyright was more powerful.

He needs to lose badly and soon, before those people die and can't testify
against him.

------
zeroxfe
Wow, this is just like that dude running around calling himself the inventor
of the chromebook.

------
S_A_P
It seems that he is using the tactic of racial conspiracy to muddy the waters.
When you can't win on facts alone, make it about race and conspiracies.

------
snambi
Sounds like a scam. Can government prevent such open scams?

------
notknown32
Wow. Ayyadurai won $750,000 in a lawsuit from by-then-bankrupt Gawker Media.
In fact it was billionaire Peter Thiel, who just wanted to ruin Gawker and was
behind this result. Duh. What a waste of $750k.

"Denton wrote that "we expected to prevail" in the Ayyadurai and Terrill
lawsuits, "but all-out legal war with" billionaire Peter Thiel, who
financially backed Harder, was untenable in terms of cost, time and human
toll.[37]" . Wikipedia.

------
Spooky23
Another lunatic with an Alex Jones connection.

------
ngold
Im assuming he has not watched Mike Judges Silicon Valley.

------
eblah
I rarely comment, but the article, until the last page was great. It felt very
bait and switch -- pull you along with the story, then, oh yeah... you could
vote for this guy, and be just as terrible as he is.

While the article is very biased against him, which I would usually feel is
fine (and without further researching the topic, I'd agree he seems pretty
terrible), but if there's a possibility that this is politically motivated let
people know up front. Why not add his political affiliation early in the first
page, instead of waiting until the very the end?

And to be clear, I don't believe that he "invented email."

~~~
mcv
His political affiliation isn't terribly relevant. The problem is that he
wants to rewrite history and claim fame that's not his. He may want to run as
a Republican now, but he's also convinced Noam Chomsky to support his claim.
Politics isn't the point. Here's a guy who's very effective at scamming people
into believing his lies and supporting his false claims.

------
elandybarr
Shiva is a great guy. I strongly encourage readers to watch or listen to him
actually speak, rather than get that third-hand.

I'm glad that he won against Gawker and am cheering for him to defeat
Elizabeth Warren for Senate. He is the kind of smart, wise, and experienced
technocrat that we could use in government, with an actual numerical sense and
experience staffing teams and making payroll.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _[Ayyadurai] is a great guy_

Great people don't sue news outlets to claim credit for things they say they
did decades ago. They sue for royalties, or better yet, shut up and do things.
This guy checks all the boxes for a sociopathic fraud.

~~~
arkitaip
He really comes off as a sociopath if you check his Twitter, where he calls
someone a moron, keeps attacking Elizabeth Warren, and treats Alex Jones/Info
Wars as a serious media outlet [0]. Also, it's hilarious that he considers
himself the target of a racist conspiracy but goes to great lengths to deny
that Trump's and Bannon's racist politics. And this is a guy who is running
for senate.

[0] [https://twitter.com/va_shiva](https://twitter.com/va_shiva)

~~~
elandybarr
I have spoken to him at length myself.

If you don't think Infowars is a serious news outlet, maybe you haven't
watched them? In about 20 years they have had I think 3 retractions, which a
propaganda rag like CNN or the Washington Post has to do _weekly_.

I would wish that HN would have more people who care about primary sources -
that is what my academic training taught me. Perhaps if you listened to any of
Bannon's speeches rather than malicious rumor and hearsay, you would have a
different opinion.

~~~
mcphage
They had to do one a month or so ago because they were peddling an insane
theory involving yogurt.

~~~
bcg1
And pizzagate

[http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2017/03/26/521545788/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2017/03/26/521545788/conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-apologizes-for-
promoting-pizzagate)

