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

[Subramanian, Ramesh Prof.]

Ditto. Thanks, Tom. I forwarded your mail to the Yale ISP Fellows 
mailing list.

Regards,
-Ramesh

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ramesh Subramanian, Ph.D.
Gabriel Ferrucci Professor of Information Systems
Quinnipiac University
275 Mount Carmel Avenue
Hamden, CT 06518.
Email: rameshs at quinnipiac.edu
Web: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1288.xml?Person=23345&type=5
&
Visiting Fellow, Information Society Project
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511.
Email: ramesh.subramanian at yale.edu
Web: http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/9841.htm


On 2/27/2012 7:58 PM, Debbie wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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 defendAyyadurai’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 whetherAyyadurai 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 toAyyadurai 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 
>> <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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