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Local man who claims he invented e-mail sues Gawker, which says he didn't

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who says he invented e-mail as a 14-year-old in 1978, is suing Gawker and its owner for at least $35 million, claiming articles in 2012 that questioned his claim got him fired as an MIT lecturer and that a follow-up in 2014 lost him paid speaking engagements and other jobs around the world.

Ayyadurai, who now lists our own Middlesex County as his home base, says he built a program he called EMAIL while working as a young research fellow at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He has said earlier work on the ARPANET network that became today's Internet was merely text messaging, not the full-bodied e-mail system with cc and bcc fields he says he built.

In his suit, filed yesterday in US District Court, Ayyadurai claims that not only did the articles lose him business, they caused him great emotional distress.

He says this means he's entitled to damages above the $35 million he sets as a base amount, especially since the author of two of the three articles is, he claims, a drug addict who should never have been let near a word processor.

Gawker is a company that routinely engages in wrongful conduct, and specifically, writes and publishes false and defamatory statements about people, invades people’s privacy and other rights, and publishes content that is irresponsible and that no other legitimate publication will publish.

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Comments

He filed a copyright for the word 'EMAIL'.

As Tomlinson (the REAL father of email) points out in the article; I could file a copyright for the word 'OPERATING SYSTEM'', doesn't mean I invented an OS.

DIE TROLL DIE!

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I did. I called them 'comments' back in the day. Adam owes me...

After all, Bill Gates patented ones and zeros.

http://www.theonion.com/article/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-599

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What's up with Fran Drescher. Are the married or not? Wikipedia says he isn't and is.

Ayyadurai later said it was not "a formal wedding or marriage", but a celebration of their "friendship in a spiritual ceremony with close friends and her family.

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Even in the complaint he can't lay off the shady spin. One of many examples: "In June 2012, Wired magazine reported that: “Email ... the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today, was invented in 1978 by [Dr. Ayyadurai] .... The facts are indisputable.""

Yes, those words appeared in Wired, but as a quote from Chomsky, which the Wired piece treats as both amusing and debatable. Wired in no way "reported" this as fact.

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The article that you linked to with the text "questioned his claim" isn't there anymore. What did it say?

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The article didn't go away; I screwed up the HTML tag for it. I clearly didn't invent the link checker. Sorry about that.

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If you've got some time, there's a great summary of the whole saga here: http://www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai

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Maybe there's a more charitable explanation to all this? Gawker is facing bankruptcy at the hands of Hulk Hogan. Perhaps they're willing to throw in the towel on this suit to screw Hogan out of $35m?

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