A “Cover Everyone’s Ass” Disclaimer: This comment neither represents the opinions nor speaks on behalf of Mike Masnick, any other Techdirt contributor or commenter, or Techdirt as a company.

(And a “Cover My Ass” Disclaimer: Most of the non-quoted material below is adapted from comments made on Ars Technica and Techdirt articles about Shiva Ayyadurai. I do not claim ownership of those comments — but I do share the opinions they express.)

Shiva Ayyadurai invented an email system at age 14, almost certainly with little or no awareness of any prior art. His work was impressive, especially given his age. But this invention was in isolation both before and after, and the mainstream evolution of electronic messaging happened independently of his ideas and his code. People invent things in isolation all the time. It makes for a good yarn between nerds at a convention, but little else, precisely because it occurred in isolation. Coming up with an idea and writing the code for it is cool — getting it widely adopted and used, however, is far more noteworthy.

So far as anyone can tell, Ayyadurai has done little or nothing of note since then — and he is still letting this one minor achievement consume his life nearly forty years later. His methods of pursuing his claims are both aggressive and downright malicious. He will end businesses and bankrupt people in pursuit of a trivial vanity claim, regardless of its truth. His refusal to accept that history sometimes gets made by people who started earlier puts him deep into "nutcase" territory, as does his twisting of logic, his moving the goalposts, his appeals to irrelevant legal authority, and his belief in a conspiracy theory designed to make him the victim of racism.

Youthful software development, especially back when the resources for that were both scarce and unfriendly, would be something to put on a resumé. Again, given what Ayyadurai did, that would be impressive enough on its own. He has instead gone all-in on a claim that requires ARPANET to have never existed for his claim to be, at the bare minimum, chronologically coherent. Even if we accept his claims, he admitted that his system did not have any true successors. It was one of the numerous in-house messaging systems that predated widespread email adoption, existed in relative isolation, died without having much broader influence, and was eventually replaced with email as we know it today.

Ayyadurai’s argument that ARPANET and other systems people had heard of were just primitive text messaging that wasn’t at all like electronic mail could be correct — but only under the right circumstances and reasoning. The ARPANET messaging system was the genuine predecessor of the email systems that were widely adopted by the general public; Ayyadurai’s system, which lived and died in isolation, was not.

Then again, Ayyadurai claims to have invented all email:

“I was issued the first US copyright for EMAIL,” he said on The Alex Jones Show[.] “I was officially recognized as the inventor of email.” … Aamoth introduced the piece by reciting Ayyadurai’s view that the 1978 EMAIL program was when “e-mail—as we currently know it—was born.” … “And I’m telling you, e-mail is the electronic version of the replicated form of the interoffice mail system, and I defined it. I called it E-M-A-I-L. These are facts.[”]

If his claim was simply that he "invented" an email program in isolation, no one would generally care, one way or the other. His claim would be true and an interesting footnote, yet otherwise unremarkable. When he claims to have invented email in general, accuses others of trying to write him out of history when they point out that his program had nothing to do with the development of email as people know and use it today (including development of the major protocols that govern modern email), and sues someone for pointing that out, he deserves all the mockery he gets.

Supporters of Ayyadurai might make claims of "parallel creation", arguing that both he and the developers of ARPANET are "originators" of what became email. But Ayyadurai himself argues that everything else in development before he wrote his program that people think of as "email" is not email — that his program is the first thing which qualifies as email. When he claims exclusivity in the role, he undermines the entire "parallel creation" argument.

If Shiva Ayyadurai had claimed he independently created a program that reflects more features of a modern email system than other established electronic messaging systems of the time, it might be a truer, more reasonable claim. On its own, that claim would be deserving of respect, especially in regards to the "independently" part. But what Ayyadurai has claimed in practice is nowhere near close to that.

He has mocked those that worked on the projects that resulted in email as the public knows it. He has said their work, and its results, do not count, then constantly redefined the meaning of "email" so he could "win" the argument. He has never offered, and has yet to produce, any evidence that anyone who developed either the ARPANET messaging system or the three major email protocols had ever heard about or seen his work — or that it inspired them to develop modern email. He has filed lawsuits against outlets and people who presented the facts that contradict his version of history (and maybe called him mean names, to boot). If he wanted respect for what he truly accomplished as a teenager, he lost that chance when he tried to have the courts turn his claims into the truth.

Shiva Ayyadurai invented an email system at age 14. That much is true. Everything else he claims about his role in the development of email is willful misrepresentation at best and a deliberate lie at worst.

And if he does not like my saying so, he can sue me.