1st Amendment wins in self-proclaimed e-mail inventor’s Techdirt libel suit
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Honestly the article provides a lot of helpful information about the claims and certainly backs it up with research and citations. Unfortunately it sounds like he won't be able to recover his legal costs for this, which Masnick is arguing (and I would agree with) that there should be greater risks with SLAPP lawsuits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...)
The root issue is that he created a program whose name happened to be EMAIL so when laymen misinterpret the claim to mean "e-mail" and the plaintiff doesn't correct them, it results in confusion that benefits him. The reporter tried to cast light on that and it seems like the plaintiff is trying to leverage the same confusion to win in court.
"Accordingly, whether plaintiff's claim to have invented e-mail is "fake" depends upon the operative definition of "e-mail". Because that definition does not have a single, objectively correct answer, the claim is incapable of being proved true or false."
Since defamation requires a false statement, and because the definition of e-mail can't be proven true or false, it can't be defamation.
[0] - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3987555-Gov-Uscourts...
Well, I suppose he "married" Fran Dresher in the same way he "invented" email. He didn't really marry her.
http://komonews.com/news/entertainment/actress-fran-drescher...
There are plenty of people who are intelligent in a canonical, book-learned sense, but who are nevertheless badly stunted in other cognitive areas. Call it emotional intelligence or whatever, but folks who are retarded in this aspect can be simultaneously "smart" and yet behave in outlandishly stupid ways. Shiva seems to me a sad and extreme case of this.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6lfinq/im_shiva....
I'm curious, is there anyone who supports his claim other than him and his family? Is there anyone on his side?
Ayyadurai is a pathetic, miserable excuse for a joke. His lawsuit should have been dismissed as a matter of summary judgment; the fact that it has made it this far is so, so very sad.
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3987555-Gov-Uscourts...
The law firm backing him is the one that seems to have been founded / bankrolled by Peter Thiel primarily for the purpose of suing Gawker. And Ayyadurai was also suing Gawker, also represented by the same lawyer.
Techdirt also not having been particularly kind to Thiel, there's a good chance he's at least one supporter of Ayyadurai.
That said, to my knowledge, Thiel has refused to publicly deny it. If SV had more scruples, he'd be forced to go on the record about it, because funding Ayyadurai would be indefensible.
Regardless of whether Ayyadurai's cases got more support from Thiel, without Thiel Harder isn't there to do this in the first place.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/13/3082157/noam-chomsky-shiv...
I admit my initial reaction was "of course this guy's a charlatan," and read 10 things that seems to support that. For example here is a review of the development of e-mail primitives prior to Ayyadurai's work.[2] It starts out pretty level headed, but later on in the updates to Ayyadurai's responses it gets more defensive and flustered in tone, and the technical arguments become impenetrable -- which to me are signs that there's more substance to Ayyadurai's claim than you might think.
The heart of the matter is that many of the primitives of what became e-mail developed in the 70s, but the question is what constituted a fully integrated user-friendly inter-organizational system. Ayyadurai's showpiece of evidence is that Dave Crocker stated in 1977 that "At this stage, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale inter-organization mail system" that confirmed to the "cognitive model of a regular office-memo system".[3]
Crocker has since walked back[4] that claim and said his report doesn't say what it says... It's very odd. It very clearly states, right in the summary, that the "cognitive models" and "psychological aspects" did not yet match what "typical users" expected of messaging systems.
And looking back through [2], I see a lot of words but no evidence that there was a functioning, user-friendly system that addressed these "psychological aspects" prior to Ayyadurai. So basically, it does seem plausible that he brought these concepts together in a way no one had quite done before, in his basement when he was 14 or whatever, and him being all self-congratualtory about it really pisses the "establishment Internet guys" off that worked on all these primitives.
Maybe it's me, but honestly this all smacks of the classic "engineers don't appreciate UX design" conflict. "Oh you just figured out some UI stuff.. that's not real engineering..."
[1] http://www.inventorofemail.com/noam-chomsky-on-invention-of-...
[2] http://www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai
[3] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3318894-R2134.html#d...
[4] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-m...
I think I've used email since the 1980s. I think I still use email.
Yet I have never used an email client with the essential elements that Ayyadurai claims an email system must have.
For example, in the mid 1990s my mail email client was BSD Mail in the terminal, and a local Sendmail. There was no relational system, no address book, no printing, and so on.
Does that mean I didn't really use email in the 1990s? Or does it mean that Ayyadurai's definition is too specific? I think it's the latter.
Perhaps I don't appreciate UX design, but it also feels like Ayyadurai doesn't appreciate the work of the scores of people who came before him.
I think he also feels his work is not appreciated by the establishment. In all of this I don't see many people really examining how his system worked and what problems it solved. They're very focused on arguing that this or that piece existed earlier, so he has no claim. Part of it is his fault for laying claim to such a grandiose title. But I'm also feeling there is a typical lack of appreciation among his critics for what we would now call UX work, i.e. making a usable system.
Was I, in the 1980s and 1990s, using email, when I didn't use a system which has the features that he says are required to be called "email"?
If I wasn't using email, then he's using a definition which is highly idiosyncratic.
If I was using email, then people before him, in the 1970s, were using email. More specifically, which feature finally made a simple text mail client like BSD Mail become "email".
The concept "usable" is effectively meaningless. You can always change the threshold. Gmail is far more usable than his system was.
I mean come on, that can't be true. You've just invalidated the whole field of UX and perhaps the most defining aspect of breakthrough products. Yes, it's hard to define and up to debate. That's why there's a debate. But it doesn't help to say, we can't talk about it, only concrete primitives.
As to his definition of email, I think you're mixing up his program's specific feature list (printing, relational DB, etc.) with his definition, which is more general. Having said that I do think it's a bit too strong to require 100% compliance to his definition, like requiring an address book.[1] Having said that, when we compare that list to what was available in 1978 it's much starker how advanced it was (assuming it actually worked).
You are correct, I have confused table 1 and table 2. Here is what the definition from your link says:
> Email is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. Email is not simply the exchange of text messages. Email is really a system --- a system of interlocking parts, each of which is essential for ordinary people to communicate effectively with one or many others, in an environment where different kinds of information must be shared (memos, documents, files, etc.) i.e. the modern office environment.
It then lists 30 some odd features in Table 1, followed by:
> All of these parts, interconnected together, were essential to the functioning of the interoffice mail system. If any one component was taken away, such as Attachments or Folders or the ability to send Carbon Copies, you no longer had a functioning interoffice mail system.
By that definition, I did not use email for many years, despite thinking that I did use email.
Specifically, BSD Mail did not support drafts, attachments, folders (including trash folders), an address book, return receipts, or prioritization, to pick the most obvious ones. [0] According to the above definition, I didn't have a "functioning interoffice mail system".
Which is perfectly fine with me, as I didn't need one. But that's because I do not believe that "Email is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system."
Otherwise, what's the word which describes what I did in exchanging messages over SMTP?
The entire argument is based on a definition of email which is so hyperspecific that it would be laughable if there weren't expensive lawsuits involved.
[0] I composed email messages as files. Once done I sent the file. BSD Mail can append a message to a file, but not to folders - I specified the filename. The first time I saw an attachment in a mail application was at a NeXTStep demo. MIME wasn't out. Instead, I uuencoded any "attachment" manually, and included it as part of the message.
Also, I still use BSD Mail as quick reader because I'm always logged into my mail server machine, and it's easier to type "Mail" followed by the message number than to download it into Mail.app.
I would say his definition is not "hyperspecific". Those 30-odd feature are, in fact, a pretty uncontroversially fair set of expected functionality in email systems. And the fact that he (supposedly) implemented them ahead of even the systems you were using in the 80s is worth note.
The list leaves out all of the other features that we expect in a modern email system meant for non-technical users, like a GUI interface including drag&drop attachments, spell-checking as you type, and rich text.
Where do you draw the line? Which UX features are critical before saying something is "email", and which are non-essential? The thesis, which I strongly disagree with, is that all of those features are required to have email.
Once you weaken those hyper-specific requirements somewhat, he is no longer the inventor of email.
While if you strengthen those requirements, email didn't happen until a decade or more later.
You write: "And the fact that he (supposedly) implemented them ahead of even the systems you were using in the 80s is worth note."
No, it it not worth a note. It means I was a student with only access to crappy systems. I was asking why I was wrong to say that I was using email on such a crappy system that did not implement all of the required points of Table 1.
That SIGCIS link you pointed to shows a 1 minute ad about Laurel, from Xerox PARC. It's a mouse-driven email system with, among other things, group support ("everyone on the routing list should see this"), local message sorting, and WYSIWIG output to a laser printer. In 1978.
That's what's of note. The flip side to my question is, why wasn't Laurel or other systems from 1978 also email?
He's not just self-congratulatory. He blames his lack of recognition on a "deep-state" conspiracy involving the military-industrial complex. And racism [0].
And let's not forget how he publicly disparaged Ray Tomlinson as a liar [1].
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6lfinq/im_shiva...
1 - https://mobile.twitter.com/va_shiva/status/70667069971333529...
My expectation of email today is "I enter some address(es), define the addresses as TO, CC, and BCC, type a message into the body (or extend an existing message) and send the contents to a server which then re-transmits it as necessary."
That's the core of email... Every email program I've ever used can handle those elements, sometimes with only plaintext, but that's the core I learned decades ago. I wonder when that would have been available.
I suspect that multiple people should be credited with advancing this tech. It is likely that the title "inventor of email" is a one-sided and incorrect view of history.
Sutherland and Engelbart pioneered GUI technology, but I wouldn't want to use the system either created. However to deny them credit in the development of the GUI (Engelbart in particular), would be re-writing history.
For example John Vittal created a system called MSG that had many of those elements[1], but by his own admission "Its major drawback is that it does not have a directly integrated message creation facility with the same style of user-interface as the rest of MSG."[2] So for this and other reasons Ayyadurai deems it not meeting the standard of a "full-scale emulation of the interoffice mail system," which is basically how he is defining "email".
This is all about where to draw the line on what constitutes "email" and who crossed it first. We should know by now, as an industry, that UX really matters, and so there may be some merit to focusing on how primitives are packaged together in a sufficiently usable form, not just when each of them came into existence separately.
I do agree that brandishing terms like "inventor" are not the way to approach this. It was a collective effort. But I also have become a bit sympathetic to his feeling shut out of the history of Internet by establishment, working-for-government-labs coterie. Maybe that motivated him to be more outspoken and provocative. On some level we should be celebrating that a 14 year old kid, in a working on his own with little support, could figure out a complete system in a way that govt labs couldn't -- not diminishing it as lesser than "inventing the @ convention" or whatever. That's part of the hacker ethos at the core of what we all do.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-m...
Likewise, Babbage was dealing with the primitives of computation. He couldn't even get those primitives working. So both his UX and backend were unusable. So what should historians do? They give credit to Babbage for his work, but then talk about the work of 20th century scientists and engineers separately. There are a lot of people who made contributions to computing.
I think there is a difference between "wrote a great email client[0]" and "invented email." Writing a great email client is cool. But I think trying to inflate that accomplishment into making it sound like email didn't exist beforehand (thus diminishing the contributions of others) is wrong.
Take a look at RFC 733[1] from 1977. It sounds a lot like email. As a bonus, they are talking about interoperability, which I think is a really important feature for email. A feature that I suspect Ayyadurai's client did not provide (but I could be wrong).
From the arstechnica link, it sounds like the earliest Ayyadurai started the work was in summer of 1978. At best, he can claim he independently invented and developed concepts that were publicly understood (even if he was unaware of the work going on elsewhere).
But the truth is that the public doesn't care about someone writing a piece of software (unless the author became a billionaire for doing so). So the only claim that would get any attention is "inventor of..."
[0] I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and assert the email client was great. With 500 users[0.1] it certainly didn't popularise the technology.
[0.1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-m...
Techdirt wasn't bankrupt and could afford to fight the case. Not to put too fine a point on it, this was before a judge in Massachusetts rather than before a jury in Florida as Bollea v. Gawker had been.
That's so wrong.
[1] Quote: "Ayyadurai developed some little system that he called 'email'"