Who didn’t invent email? Shiva Ayyadurai.
He’s not the only one – I didn’t invent email either, nor did Abraham Lincoln, Boadicea or Tim Berners-Lee. So why mention Shiva?
He claims that in 1978 when he was 14, he took some courses in programming. His mum worked for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and one of her colleagues challenged him to write an electronic mail system. And he did just that, creating a basic messaging system in FORTRAN, based on the existing paper memo format, ending up with a non-networked electronic mail system with similar functionality to mainstream applications that were in use well over a decade earlier.
That’s pretty impressive, and is the sort of thing that’ll look good on a college application form. (When I was 13 I designed and implemented a chassis dynamometer management unit that Shell’s research division used to test fuel and lube oil performance over virtual driving tracks – dozens of pages of 6502 assembly code, and you can be sure I put that on my college application form).
Some years later, in 1982, Shiva applied for and was granted a certificate of copyright registration on that piece of software. A copyright is not a patent – it recognizes and protects the expression of the work, not the idea underlying the work. There’s no real bar for copyright, other than it being a piece of work you created yourself – I automatically own copyright to anything I create, including software I’ve written and this blog post. Registering a copyright on a work, whether it be software or anything else, is a trivial exercise in bureaucracy – you fill in a form, you pay a registration fee, it gets rubber stamped. What is protected by the copyright is the work – in this case the software source code – itself, not the ideas, not the name of the package, nothing else. (I have copyright on my software package, Abacus. That doesn’t mean that I invented the Abacus.)
Meanwhile, Shiva moved into email marketing, founded a small ESP, and seems to be doing quite nicely (although a journalist who looked can’t find much evidence of the ESP being successful, or even existing, other than a lawsuit it filed against IBM and American Express for misappropriation of trade secrets in 2005).
Back in 2011, though, things started to get weird. Shiva started to use this copyright filing, and the fact that he used the title “EMAIL” on the filing, to support a claim that he was “the inventor of email”. It’s a compelling human interest / tech story to journalists whose knowledge of email and internet history is vague, so it got quite a bit of coverage.
(Shiva makes an image of his copyright certificate available: http://www.vashiva.com/images/vashiva_patent3_enl.jpg. Note that the URL describes it as a “patent”, rather than a copyright filing.)
It was quickly debunked. It didn’t pass the sniff test. Technical blogs started asking how the Washington Post and other press had fallen for this. The Washington Post clarified that pretty much all the significant claims in the original article were untrue.
It didn’t go away, though. Two-and-a-half years later, there’s a series of articles in the Huffington Post, pitching the same story, this time with a few unpleasant twists in it’s approach. It’s got a glossy infographic, filled with provably false claims. It has the feel of a professional PR campaign, rather than an article written by a reporter. Sure enough, it’s written by Larry Weber, a high powered PR guy (CEO of RacepointGlobal – who “build the right influencer relationships for your brand” – and CEO of Weber Public Relations Worldwide). There are at least five article in the series, all written by different people, but having oddly similar phrasing.
Shiva’s ESP, EchoMail, and their current branding is based around his (false) claim to be the “Inventor of Email”, so there’s clearly money as well as ego at stake. Neither Larry Weber nor the Huffington Post mentioned that Larry Weber is also on the board of EchoMail.
So we’re going through the debunking process again. I was going to write more, but others are way ahead of me.
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