Email

Back in the infancy of the adoption of email there were some young men who worked for Chevron.

They took to communicating with one another through email while the older Chevron employees used traditional slower methods of communicating.

The younger men were getting things done much faster as a result.

Of course today everyone uses email and it seems like no big deal.

 Three months ago Shiva Ayyadurai ( A man who did not invent email) won a $750,000 settlement from Gawker (after they'd already gone bankrupt).

He'd argued Gawker defamed him by mocking Ayyadurai's claim he'd invented email, and now he's also suing Techdirt founder Michael Masnick -- who is not bankrupt, and is fighting back.

 Ars Technica: In his motion, Masnick claims that Ayyadurai "is seeking to use the muzzle of a defamation action to silence those who question his claim to historical fame." 

He continues, "The 14 articles and 84 allegedly defamatory statements catalogued in the complaint all say essentially the same thing:

 that Defendants believe that because the critical elements of electronic mail were developed long before Ayyadurai's 1978 computer program, his claim to be the 'inventor of e-mail' is false"...

The motion skims the history of e-mail and points out that the well-known fields of e-mail messages, like "to," "from," "cc," "subject," "message," and "bcc," were used in ARPANET e-mail messages for years before Ayyadurai made his "EMAIL" program.

 Ayyadurai focuses on statements calling him a "fake," a "liar," or a "fraud" putting forth "bogus" claims. Masnick counters that such phrases are "rhetorical hyperbole" meant to express opinions and reminds the court that "[t]he law provides no redress for harsh name-calling." 
 
The motion calls the lawsuit "a misbegotten effort to stifle historical debate, silence criticism, and chill others from continuing to question Ayyadurai's grandiose claims.

" Ray Tomlinson has been dead for less than a year, but in this fascinating 1998 article recalled testing the early email protocols in 1971, remembering that "Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP."