Categories: OLD Media Moves

Judge dismisses libel lawsuit against Techdirt

A judge has dismissed a libel lawsuit against tech news site Techdirt, which had been sued by a man claiming he invented email.

Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica writes, “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 Wednesday 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.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.