
Who invented e-mail? Inside Shiva Ayyadurai’s legal war against his critics - sequence7
https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/who-invented-e-mail-shiva-ayyadurai-history/
======
ckastner
OK, this story again...

There's a quote in the article that, I think, also accurately summarizes it:

 _To people like Haigh, the computer historian, this is a case of simply
defining “e-mail” in such a way that nothing else fits._

 _“He is trying to make a definition of e-mail which would exclude everything
before his system,” said Haigh in an interview. “That’s not how you get to do
it. The person who says they invented an airplane in 1918 doesn’t get to say,
‘It’s only an airplane if it has six windows, it’s built with metal, and it
has a retracting undercarriage.’”_

This guy got a copyright on a computer program he named EMAIL, and he's
milking the story for everything it's got. Hardly surprising, if that is one's
one claim to fame.

~~~
jboy
He seems to be operating under 3 main delusions (with a healthy dose of caste-
related inferiority complex mixed in):

1\. Confusion about the differences (or even the fact that they are different)
between copyright, trademark, and patent. He copyrighted some software called
"EMAIL", which anyone could do. That doesn't give him any ownership of the
term "email" (as a trademark would), nor does it register him as the inventor
in any way (as a patent would).

2\. A belief that being (maybe) the first to name something X makes him the
inventor of X. (At best, he could possibly be described as "one of the first
to coin the term 'email'.")

3\. A belief that naming something X subsequently defines what X is. Hence, he
disregards all predecessors as "not X because they are not exactly the same as
what I called X".

Over time, his caste-related inferiority complex seems to have evolved into a
strong mistrust of recognised authority ("What does Vint Cerf know?") and then
further into a conspiracy about the "military-industrial complex".

He seems more sadly deluded than an intentional charlatan.

------
opportune
What a reprehensible individual. It's sad that people like him are able to
abuse the legal system for a living.

Dude is clearly a narcissist to boot. Nobody publishes a book with their own
photo on the front to talk about how great they are, while simultaneously
having contributed basically nothing of value to society, without having some
serious problems.

~~~
Chris2048
It's a shame, as the guy holds four degrees.

The reference to his own background (caste etc) and accusations of racism
might hint that he has a chip on the shoulder..

~~~
mcv
It is sad. He was clearly a brilliant kid back then. I don't know any details
of his email system, but if it really was just as comprehensive as the
existing email systems, but developed without any knowledge or input from the
existing email systems, that's a spectacular achievement. It's absolutely
something to be proud of, and I can totally understand that at the time, as a
14 year old, he believed he invented something new.

But he's a grown man now. He should know better. If he's so smart, he should
realize that he wasn't the first. But instead, he's leveraging a lie to claim
undeserved fame.

------
danso
This is mentioned in the article, but the news hook here is that Ayyadurai is
suing Techdirt for libel in a case that Techdirt describes as, "Techdirt's
First Amendment Fight For Its Life"

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170111/11440836465/techd...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170111/11440836465/techdirts-
first-amendment-fight-life.shtml)

~~~
ghaff
And he apparently got a $750K settlement from Gawker from an earlier suit. (It
seems to have been one of a couple of other settlements at the time Gawker was
going out of business because of the Hulk Hogan case. I assume that the
bankruptcy trustees or whoever just wanted suits to go away so they could sell
off the company cleanly.)

~~~
mikeyouse
He shared the same Thiel-funded lawyer as Hogan in the Google suit and won't
say if Thiel's funding this one as well since he's using the same lawyer
again:

[https://www.google.com/amp/gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-wont-
say-...](https://www.google.com/amp/gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-wont-say-if-hes-
bankrolling-lawsuit-against-1791652277/amp)

------
throwaway123973
His milking of the 'caste' and 'race' (which Chomsky fully endorses) is
cringeworthy. Never mind the fact that his parents were part of the elite who
did manage to leave the colony.

~~~
akhilcacharya
He went to MIT. It's nothing short of astonishing that he can claim to not be
part of the elite.

------
phonon
No mention that he was "married" to Fran Drescher? [1] I wonder what she
thinks about all this...

[1] [http://komonews.com/news/entertainment/actress-fran-
drescher...](http://komonews.com/news/entertainment/actress-fran-drescher-
splits-from-husband)

------
mark-r
I used to wonder if I had invented email, on a large timesharing system in
1975. Then I found the history of Internet email and I realized how silly I
was.

------
awjr
I'm really unsure why something like that would be important to anyone. I
define myself by what I am doing and what I hope to achieve. What I did 35
years ago belongs to a person I no longer am.

~~~
boredpudding
This is talked about in the article. A lot of his businesses rely on the claim
that he invented email to gain more customers.

~~~
awjr
I helped write the Swanwick En Route Short Term Collision Alert System that
covers most airports in the south of England about 20 years ago. I primarily
use it to terrify people who are about to go on holiday.

"OOOh you're about to fly through my code!" :D

------
pg_bot
"according to Ayyadurai, an RFC, or Request for Comment, is not 'a computer
program or code or a system,' and so is presumably unfit to be historical
evidence"

This comes as a surprise to anyone who has had to debug actual email code
before. Very recently I had to reference RFC 561, 821 and 1341 when dealing
with a bug breaking attached CSV files.

He may have invented an "email" program but he certainly did not invent email
as we currently know. History will not remember this pretender.

------
jrimbault
Searching "Who invented email?" on Google is terrifying.

~~~
lostboys67
FFS that is just wrong and Vint Cerf should be able point that as he worked
for companies that did mail before this clowns.

------
lostboys67
Total Bolocks I was working for Dialcom / Telecom Gold in the 1980's on email
and dialup services and they had email before 1982

------
nxsynonym
This is the guy who slacked off in all your college classes and then claimed
he did all the work on the one group project that he never showed up for.

Why does anyone insist on writing anything about him anymore? He clearly only
wants to the media attention. Haven't we learned that feeding media-vampires
only creates monsters we aren't equipped to deal with?

~~~
bad_good_guy
well, no, that metaphor doesn't apply well at all.

he's clearly intelligent and does work, but he's also clearly twisting the
definition to get his name in the history books.

why he needs this despite his intelligence i dont know

~~~
nxsynonym
He needs the attention because it's what drives him, hence the project-credit
metaphor.

Intelligence is only as useful as its application and spinning your wheels
trying to take credit by bending a definition is not the best use of time.

------
Chris2048
> even though his code had little impact beyond the university. Mainstream
> tech history books don’t even mention Ayyadurai—unless you count the several
> books Ayyadurai has written about himself

Today on HN, "A Wolfram is born"..

------
davidf18
Kim Mast developed an email system in 1974 on a computer system called PLATO
at the University of Illinois with thousands of users using 512x512 graphics
computer terminals which were located throughout the country and had output
speeds of 180 characters/sec.

[http://www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm](http://www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm)

Also a year prior to that a forum system was developed by David Woolley

There is a current version still working on this system:
[https://cyber1.org](https://cyber1.org)

------
have_faith
Is the idea of self-ownership of ideas a modern / western invention? How old
is copyright / trademark / patent as a broad concept?

~~~
patrickg_zill
There were trade secrets prior to any official patents system.

For instance, a family of physicians that kept their invention of forceps used
in delivering babies, a secret for more than 100 years:

[http://mentalfloss.com/article/85527/show-tell-
obstetrical-f...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/85527/show-tell-obstetrical-
forceps-invention-kept-secret-more-century)

~~~
Vendan
technically, trade secrets are roughly the opposite of patents. Trade secrets
are "tell no one, and no one can use it cause they don't know about it",
whereas patents are "tell everyone, and the government will make sure no one
can use it for a while", with the advantage of patents being that a) the
public will be able to use it once your patent term is up, while b) the
government becomes the enforcer, rather then your ability to keep the secret.
Monopolies are largely recognized as a potential negative, but in this case,
patents provide a way to encourage publicizing knowledge. Without patents,
companies would attempt to keep everything a secret, arguably a negative to
society.

~~~
have_faith
The idea of publicising knowledge and then saying 'it's illegal to do anything
with this knowledge' feels intuitively wrong but I can't explain succinctly
why. 20 years also seems too long as well but again, hard to explain why. I
understand that monopolies are wrong, but so is teaching a man to fish and
telling him he can't make a rod from a known good design for 20 years.

~~~
Vendan
it's a tradeoff. Which is better, saying "here's how to make a better fishing
rod, but I get to be the only one to make it for 20 years" or "I know how to
make a better fishing rod, but I'm not going to tell anyone else, this
knowledge may be lost at any point, and I'm going to be the only one making
them for the next 50 years."

------
surfrider
In other /mildlyinteresting thoughts, Did anyone ever run a FidoNet node?

------
Chris2048
yikes: [https://yourstory.com/2015/02/shiva-
ayyadurai/](https://yourstory.com/2015/02/shiva-ayyadurai/)

------
some62345
Who cares? I think that's the more important question here.

