[SIGCIS-Members] WP Ombudsman on "Email Inventor" & My Response

Mon Feb 27 16:58:11 PST 2012

Thanks Tom!  It's a good piece.

Debbie

Deborah G. Douglas, Ph.D.
Curator of Science and Technology
MIT Museum, N51-209
265 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139
tel. 617-253-1766 | fac. 617-253-8994 | ddouglas at mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/museum | http://museum.mit.edu/150

On Feb 27, 2012, at 4:30 PM, Thomas Haigh wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I just posted this to the SIGCIS site. I wasn’t going to spend any  
> more time on this story, but then when I read the Post’s Ombudsman’s  
> column over the weekend I just couldn’t restrain myself.
>
> Tom
>
> -------------------------
>
> Over the weekend the Washington Post delivered its response to a  
> storm of protest over last week’s story claiming that the  
> Smithsonian had “honored” V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai as the “inventor of  
> email.” This came in the form of the “Reader Meter” column written  
> by Patrick B. Pexton’ the Post’s Ombudsman. Seehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/omblog/post/reader-meter-who-really-invented-e-mail/2012/02/24/gIQAHZugYR_blog.html 
> .
>
> His column does offer a general implication that something about the  
> story would, in an ideal world, have been done differently. However  
> he does not concede any specific error, and concludes that “Kolawole  
> did the due diligence for the story, and she responded to the  
> readers within a reasonable time frame. That’s all an editor can do.”
>
> Pexton does not choose to defend Ayyadurai’s relatively specific  
> (and easily debunked) claim that his was the first system to include  
> from, to, cc, bcc and subject fields.
>
> Instead, in the manner of a drowning man clutching as straws, he  
> falls back on what, to him, appears to be proof that Ayyadurai must  
> have invented something important:
>
> We do know that the guy who copyrighted the terms “email” and “e- 
> mail” and who developed and copyrighted some of the computer code  
> and underpinnings of the modern versions of e-mail that we all use  
> is an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named  
> V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai. And he did some of his e-mail work when he was  
> 14, 15 and 16 years old, as a New Jersey high school student.
>
> The Smithsonian decided to honor him in February, and take all of  
> the documentation of his youthful work….
>
> There are three important claims in there. All of them are false.
>
> 1) Ayyadurai “copyrighted the terms ‘email’ and ‘e-mail’.”
>
> 2) Ayyadurai created “some of the computer code and underpinnings of  
> the modern versions of e-mail that we all use”
>
> 3) That Smithsonian decided to honor him in February.
>
> Let’s take them in that order.
>
> Has Ayyadurai copyrighted the terms ‘email’ and ‘e-mail’.
>
> No. In fact nobody who knew the first thing about copyright could  
> possibly believe that he did. Copyright grants exclusive rights over  
> the reproduction of a creative work to its author for a fixed  
> period. The author may chose to grant requests for its reproduction,  
> often in return for money.
>
> So, if the word “email” was copyrighted then I wouldn’t be able to  
> reproduce it. Nobody could write it or say it without getting  
> Ayyadurai’s permission. Maybe he’d want ten cents every time. Maybe  
> he’d grant permission only to people who agreed not to challenge his  
> claims. (There is a tradition of fair use, but that isn’t usually  
> taken to allow reproduction of the whole work, so maybe we could use  
> the letters “e” and “l”). Of course the only thing you’d achieve by  
> copyrighting a new word is making sure that it never caught on.
>
> This is why the law does not allow anyone to copyright individual  
> words, terms, or even titles. Ever notice that multiple, unconnected  
> books have the same title? Perfectly legal.
>
> What Ayyadurai has copyright on is the code of a computer system he  
> submitted to the copyright office in 1984 and a user manual from  
> 1982. This would support a claim that he was the author of this  
> program and its manual. It does absolutely nothing to support any  
> claim that this was the first email program.
>
> The appropriate form of intellectual property protection for a word  
> or short phrase would be a trademark, registered with the USPTO.  
> That would reflect a judgment that the phrase had not previously  
> been registered and would provide exclusive commercial use.  
> Ayyadurai does not have a trademark on the word email.
>
> The open question is whether Ayyadurai was the first to contract  
> “electronic mail” down to “e-mail” to name his program rather than  
> just to “mail” as on most systems. That’s actually an interesting  
> little footnote-worthy detail that has been rather obscured by his  
> claims to have invented email.
>
> Did Ayyadurai create “computer code and underpinnings of the modern  
> versions of e-mail that we all use”
>
> Consider the evidence presented on one of his many websites, http://www.inventorofemail.com/ 
> . Presented in loving detail are copyright slips for his user manual  
> and computer code, an entry for the Westinghouse Science Talent  
> Search and a program booklet page suggesting that he was one of many  
> students that year to receive some kind of honorable mention.  
> Finally there is a short 1980 inside page story from the West Essex  
> Tribune, mentioning his “design and implementation of [an]  
> electronic mail system.” It makes no description of any particular  
> novel feature of the system, but does call it sophisticated and  
> useful. Finally, part of a sentence is devoted to Ayyadurai in a  
> story on incoming students in MIT’s Tech Talk in 1981.
>
> This falls so far short of supporting a claim that his code  
> “underpins the modern versions of e-mail that we all use” that it’s  
> hard to know where to start. Let’s say that there are two main  
> problems.
>
> (1) The underpinnings for modern email had already been created  
> elsewhere by 1980. It’s not just APRPANET email, the direct  
> precursor of today’s Internet based protocols. The concept had been  
> widely distributed to the public in books like Toeffler’s The Third  
> Wave (1980) and Hiltz and Turoff’s Network Nation (1978). Electronic  
> mail had been the main subject of articles published in magazines  
> like Business Week since at least 1975. That was when office  
> automation companies (IBM, DEC, Xerox, etc) began to promote  
> electronic mail as a key feature of their current and future  
> products. Email systems were offered by commercial timesharing  
> providers, and widely used inside large technology companies. The  
> Xerox PARC email system included a recognizably modern GUI client  
> program. Email was being built into Unix as a standard feature.
>
> (2) Ayyadurai does not seem to have published any papers describing  
> his work or distributed its code to others. There is no obvious  
> direct path from being one of 12 children in New Jersey to receive  
> an honorable mention in a science competition that year to laying  
> the underpinnings for all email software in use today. There would  
> have to be a number of steps in between where the ideas in the  
> system are widely reported and everyone working on developing email  
> decides to drop what they were doing previously and copy them. A  
> short profile in a small local newspaper doesn’t quite do that. So  
> the onus would really be on him to show exactly how a system that  
> nobody ever heard of (except loyal readers of the West Essex Tribute  
> or office workers at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New  
> Jersey) came to lay the foundation for all subsequent work on email.
>
> Did the Smithsonian decide to honor Ayyadurai in February, and take  
> all of the documentation of his youthful work.
>
> No. It’s clear that the Smithsonian did accept a box or two of  
> materials from him for its archive. In as much as it honored him it  
> was by accepting this donation and not, as Pexton suggests, through  
> some separate activity. It did not present an award, host a gala  
> dinner, or do any of the other things that come to mind when someone  
> is being honored.
>
> The Smithsonian recently issued a release clarifying the reasons for  
> the acquisition.http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/pressrelease.cfm?key=29&newskey=1465 
> . This notes
>
> In accepting these objects, the museum did not claim that Ayyadurai  
> was “the inventor of email,” as some press accounts have alleged.
>
> Exchanging messages through computer systems, what most people call  
> “email,” predates the work of Ayyadurai.
>
> The statement basically says that it is interesting to preserve  
> material about a small, obscure and unknown email system as a  
> complement to the big government funded and commercial efforts we  
> were already aware of. It also mentions relevance for historians  
> interested in computer education during the era.
>
> An Aside
>
> Pexton’s opening suggests that the truth as inherently unknowable so  
> that there’s no point actually trying to find it out, which is funny  
> as it’s generally humanities scholars who get accused of postmodern  
> disregard for empirical truth, moral relativism or nihilism:
>
> Who invented e-mail? Crikey, I don’t know. Maybe Al Gore.
>
> But to properly determine who did what in the multi-year, organic  
> development of electronic messaging would take a fleet of patent  
> lawyers months and years to sort out.
>
> If only, one is tempted to speculate, society had somehow produced a  
> group of people whose work was to investing months and months,  
> sometimes even years, sorting through tangled claims and masses of  
> contradictory sources to produce a coherent and well supported  
> narratives about the past. We could call them “historians.” They  
> could write books and articles, and then people who needed to find  
> out about the past could read them without needing to hire patent  
> lawyers.
>
> Seeing this kind of thing published in the Washington Post is really  
> shameful. (Gee, I hope nobody copyrighted that word). Pexton reads  
> more like a defense lawyer for a journalist than a representative of  
> the reader. It’s like the efforts of lobbyists to create spurious  
> uncertainty over the health risks of tobacco or existence of climate  
> change. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who could  
> plausibly claim to have achieved some kind of significant  
> incremental “first” in the development of email. Untangling that  
> would be a lot of work. On the other hand there are billions of  
> people who clearly didn’t invent email. Finding this out about  
> someone is pretty easy. Unfortunately for Pexton and the Washington  
> Post, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is one of the billions of people who  
> didn't invent email. No hedges or qualifiers needed.
>
>
>
>
>
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