Judge dismisses Shiva “I Invented EMAIL” Ayyadurai’s libel lawsuit against Techdirt

A federal judge in Massachusetts has dismissed a libel lawsuit filed earlier in 2017 against tech news website Techdirt. The claim was brought by Shiva Ayyadurai, who has controversially claimed that he invented e-mail in the late 1970s. Techdirt (and its founder and CEO, Mike Masnick) has been a longtime critic of Ayyadurai and institutions that have bought into his claims. "How The Guy Who Didn't Invent Email Got Memorialized In The Press & The Smithsonian As The Inventor Of Email," reads one Techdirt headline from 2012. Numerous articles that dubbed Ayyadurai a "liar" and a "charlatan" followed. That, in turn, led to Ayyadurai's January 2017 libel lawsuit.

In the Sept 6 ruling, US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor found that because it is impossible to define precisely and specifically what e-mail is, Ayyadurai's "claim is incapable of being proved true or false." The judge continued: "One person may consider a claim to be 'fake' if any element of it is not true or if it involves a slight twisting of the facts, while another person may only consider a claim to be 'fake' only if no element of it is true."