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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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