Techdirt lawsuit settled

Back in 2017 Techdirt wrote a series of articles about Shiva Ayyadura. Shiva claims he invented email. (narrator voice: he didn’t). I wrote about the lawsuit when it was dismissed on First Amendment grounds. The parties cross appealed, and have been in settlement talks for 18 months.

According to Techdirt, the non-monetary settlement they agreed to is that all the articles in dispute will have a link to a statement published by Shiva.

You may wonder how it could possibly take 18 months to negotiate a settlement about adding links to old articles — and, indeed, I wonder that myself. The entire process has been quite a pain for us. I cannot and would not describe this result as a victory, because this has been nearly two and a half years of wasted time, effort, resources, attention and money just to defend our right to report on a public figure and explain to the world that we do not believe his claims to have invented email are correct, based on reams of evidence.