Internet Pioneers Slam $750,000 Settlement for the 'Man Who Invented Email' | Hacker News Reader

Internet Pioneers Slam $750,000 Settlement for the 'Man Who Invented Email'

gizmodo.com

91 pointsokket46 comments

This is disturbing on a First Amendment level: you can't insult someone when he makes a claim that puts him in the public spotlight, and when such a claim is highly disputable with facts?

On a tech level, this is just shameful. Neither Thiel or Ayyadurai will say if Thiel paid for this lawsuit, that it's just a coincidence that he hired the same lawyer at around the same time when Thiel hired him for the Hogan case. After Tomlinson died, Ayyadurai immediately went on the offensive and blogged, "Correction: The Inventor of Email is Still Alive"

http://fortune.com/2016/03/07/who-really-invented-email/

Edit: a more in depth story here from 2012 when the debate first broke out; MIT apparently highly disagreed with Ayyadurai's version of history and cut off ties with him http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2012/05/shiva-ayyaduri-email-u...

I haven't followed the whole Gawker/Thiel/Hogan spectacle very closely. As for Charles J. Harder representing Hogan, Ayyudurai, and Terrill, if there's an attorney that's known for a particular specialty, it would make sense to seek them out if you'd like to bring a similar case. So, while it may not be coincidence that he's representing all three, it doesn't necessarily mean that that two or more of them are being funded by Thiel. Doesn't rule it out, either.

Edit to add qualification: It isn't/wasn't my intent to turn this into a Thiel/Gawker thing like the many we've had on HN over the past weeks. It was only to float the idea that it isn't necessarily all that odd for the same lawyer to be involved in similar lawsuits. Nor to gaslight (a term that I've recently learned after reading enough comments here on HN). Like I said, I'm really ignorant about all of this and should have done more research to see what's actually been said. No more from me on this.

Thiel announced that he was funding multiple lawsuits against Gawker. There's more than a penumbra of evidence in this case.

The case for the connection is indeed circumstantial. Waiting 4 years, until 2016, could be explained by the fact that Gawker vs. Hogan was in the news and so maybe Ayyadurai thought that whoever was lawyering that case would be good for him too. I wonder if he'll get around to forcing Gawker to put up a meta tag that will force the erasure of the original Gawker stories from the Internet Archive [0], which are used to footnote his extensive Wikipedia page (which Wikipedia editors initially thought should be deleted for being an obvious vanity page, but then kept it to serve as a counterpoint against his claims [1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120306204240/http://gizmodo.co...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

This is not disturbing on a First Amendment level. What is disturbing is the misconception that the First Amendment applies to anyone other than the government.

It does seem like a questionable result on its face, but not for 1st amendment reasons.

i get what you're saying in the sense that people often erroneously cry "First Amendment" when being censored by a private entity. But the legislating of libel is most definitely a First Amendment issue. That's is why the Supreme Court makes rulings on the standard of defamation, particularly in regard to public figures:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan

The Sullivan case does not only apply to the critique of government officials. Jerry Falwell tried to sue Hustler for depicting him as an incestuous drunk; the Supreme Court ruled against him, 8-0.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell

s/government officials/public figures/ no? Or am I misunderstanding?

Jerry Falwell is not a public official, he was a famous (many would say infamous) Southern Baptist pastor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell

And I don't believe Hustler Magazine v. Falwell was in regards to whether Hustler could mock him on religious grounds. From the Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell

> Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the First and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit public figures from recovering damages for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED), if the emotional distress was caused by a caricature, parody, or satire of the public figure that a reasonable person would not have interpreted as factual.

Looks like I misread your original comment. Sorry! Thanks for clarifying.

This is an out of court settlement, not a trial result. Had it gone to trial, truth is an absolute defense to libel, so there's still no first amendment concern.

The courts are part of the government. And settling only has meaning due to the laws that govern free speech.

PS: It's not may make no law, except the kind that let's politicians sue people.

This is one private party suing another private party. All the court did is accept a settlement offer (which probably took place even before the trial itself started, so there wasn't even any actual finding of fact).

Which only happened because of how the court would have likely responded. If a judge would have thrown out the case in 5 minutes then there would have been no settlement.

"Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. ... was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States established the standard of First Amendment protection against defamation claims brought by private individuals." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertz_v._Robert_Welch,_Inc.

Ayyadurai would likely be a "limited public figure", under the Gertz v. Welch standard, given his public promotion of himself as the "inventor of email."

Its disengenious to suggest that because the government is only providing the venue whereby litigant demands hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and enforces this judgement by confiscating plantifs goods that there isn't a first ammendment interest in the case.

Just as the government may not suppress the right to speech by threat of jail and direct confiscation of money it also cannot provide a venue for other citizens to do so.

Pretending that the first ammendment and libel/defamation/slander don't intersect is a gross misstatement.

Please see

http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/civil-litigation/defamat...

https://debmcalister.com/2011/06/03/7-things-you-cant-claim-...

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/libel-defamation

That said this was settled out of court for good for ill so its moot.

I have read every word of the links you posted. If anything, they make my point.

I am not claiming that the 1st amendment and libel law do not intersect. They are quite intimately entwined! Libel laws exist for a reason: because a person has a right to maintain his or her good name in the face of false allegations. The ability to bring suit is one of our legal system's methods of protecting that right. Libel laws (which provide truth as an absolute defense) have been found to be constitutionally valid in multiple court cases over the years.

I am a bit puzzled why there was even a settlement at all. Had this gone to trial, there are enough living witnesses to the creation of email as we know it in the early 70s that the case should likely have been dismissed as without merit.

There's clearly something going on here that's not in the article, but it's not first amendment shenanigans.

According to Nick Denton, this was because he believes the Hogan and the other cases were intertwined, and if he didn't settle with Ayyadurai, Thiel would have continued to hammer Gawker, him, and his former reporters.

See, there's the real problem: a billionaire with a vendetta, not the 1st amendment. What do you do when you piss off someone worth 2.7 billion dollars?

> This is disturbing on a First Amendment level

They settled; no precedent is set. Except perhaps that if you sue a company that no longer exists, they won't pay for very good lawyers. But we probably already knew that.

> Neither Thiel or Ayyadurai will say if Thiel paid for this lawsuit

A simple Google search renders this untrue. Ayyadurai has denied several times his lawsuit has any connection with Thiel:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-03/the-other...

Sorry I didn't mean to phrase that they refuse to admit or deny. Editing post.

(Or not, too late)

Harder lawyered both the Hogan and the Ayyudurai cases. Ayyudurai is welcome to use his free speech rights to say whatever he wishes. I believe him on his relationship to Thiel about as much as I believe he invented email.

That doesn't dispute whether he denied if Thiel was backing his lawsuit. Ayyudurai has explicitly denied he was, maybe Thiel's relationship is directly with his Attorneys, maybe he's lying, maybe it's just a coincidence both used the same defamation attorney.

> he named it “email”; he obtained the first U.S. copyright to that invention, and the world’s modern system of electronic mail was born.

Wow! This struck me at first as an embarrassing error from a journalist or publicist. "copyright ... invention." But it's from Ayyadurai's attorney, so it's likely deviously clever instead of bumblingly stupid. Read the words and parse them out: "the first US Copyright to that invention." Well, ok, sure you can call copyrights inventions. Legally they often refer to them as such. But unlike patents, copyrights need not be novel. The attorney calling it "the first ... invention" is likely worded so as to intentionally confuse people who don't distinguish between copyrights, patents, trademarks and the like.

Let's say everyone on my block comes up with a design for "autonomous meshes of robot lawnmowers." If we each develop prototypes in series after having seen the others' works, perhaps they are not derived works and the designs deserve their own copyrights. But wouldn't it be silly for each of us to independently claim the title "inventor of autonomous mesh-robot-lawnmowers"? Often when ordinary people use that term they would assume it to be based on novelty and thus should be a mutually exclusive title per invention.

Interesting that Gizmodo was a gawker property and this is them essentially re-publishing the claims, immediately after setting a defamation lawsuit.

This one appears to have been written more carefully.

Every little bit helps recoup that settlement

I love how carefully this article reports on statements made in other publications without making any statements itself. Some lawyer made a good amount of money reading drafts of this thing, to make sure they can't be sued!

"Univision, which purchased most of Gawker Media’s assets (including this site) out of bankruptcy in September, deleted two Gizmodo posts concerning Ayyadurai..."

The new owners want the whole mess behind them.

More coverage here:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161103/11502935958/heres...

Does anybody know, does Peter Thiel get any of the "credit" for helping this to happen, i.e. since it's the same attorney, was it part of his same funding effort? If so, it would be somewhat hilarious--"Thiel supports claim that email was invented in 1982"--but more seriously points up more clearly that big money supporting lawsuits for revenge is not always as "civic minded" as the clear privacy issues of the Bollea case.

IMO even the article title perpetuates the problem -- quotation marks notwithstanding -- because it still pushes the phrase out there.

Why not "Man who claims he invented email"?

Anything to hurt Nick Denton and shutdown Gawker is awesome no matter how absurd the case.

I dunno, I think the settlment is right. I'm sure someone before Tomlinson invented a way to talk to someone else over electronic communication. Like, you know, the telegram? From what I can tell, Ayyadurai actually invented "email". Makes perfect sense to me.

Look at all the techies downvoting, because Tomlinson is such a genius for thinking that someone might want to use internet to communicate with each other. The reality is we call it email. That's something to brag about.

He didn't invent email.

He built something and named it "EMAIL" after email already existed.

Then he marketed himself as the inventor of email and married Fran Drescher.

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