Who invented e-mail? Inside Shiva Ayyadurai’s legal war against his critics | Hacker News Reader

Who invented e-mail? Inside Shiva Ayyadurai’s legal war against his critics

arstechnica.co.uk

63 pointssequence754 comments

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.

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.

This is currently the best refuting of his claims I've seen: http://www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai

I could imagine that in fifty years from now, there would be an internet history trivia saying "Did you know this guy invented the email and he never got credit for it?" and nobody will care if it is true, they will just go with it, because this pure guy was against all the others. Maybe, he will get his own fan-base too.

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.

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..

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.

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...

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.)

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-...

Ayyadurai has said quite a lot about other people, why has no one considered suing him?

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

The closest equivalent I can think of is being the highschool football quarterback, and then trading on that for the rest of your life, because after highschool, nothing else you did brought you as much recognition.

If you're the smartest kid in your highschool- or the best football player- you're probably pretty exceptional, compared to everyone else. But after you graduate, suddenly you're competing against the top kids from every other highschool. I think that transition can be very tough for kids who are a bit sheltered.

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

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

"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.

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

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

Google operates on references/links, so maybe the news about the controversy is enough to generate the top results?

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

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?

He has announced plans to run for state-wide political office in Massachusetts. We are probably going to hear plenty more about him.

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

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.

> 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"..

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

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

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

Relatively modern. In 1449, John of Utynam was awarded a 20-year monopoly for a glass-making process previously unknown in England, which sources seem to indicate is the first patent. English copyrights followed a couple of centuries later.

In the absence of relatively modern industrial processes, a legal system, the printing press (in the case of copyright), this sort of ownership doesn't make a lot of sense.

Though there are doubtless earlier examples where guilds or other groups of craftsmen had trade secrets related to processes such as sword making.

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...

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.

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.

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."

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

yikes: https://yourstory.com/2015/02/shiva-ayyadurai/

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

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