Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/17/techdirt-settles-lawsuit-with.html
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He will be forever remembered as the “I invented email” guy.
Unless you live in Massachusetts, where he will be remembered as the “Only a REAL Indian can defeat a FAKE Indian” guy for his losing bid to unseat Elizabeth Warren.
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I’m not pleased. This makes me furious that this asshat can walk away from this without having to cover Techdirt’s legal bills.
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I’m confused and too lazy to read the details, but why did it even have to go to court? What if they just said you can add a comment and we’re leaving it up, sorry not sorry. Also, did the guy suing have a lot of cash on his side? It just seems like an awful lot of nonsense that didn’t even need to go to court 
Ego. I’d say it “had to” go to court because ego guy wanted to shut up any critics big time. And even though he didn’t prevail in court, because Techdirt paid tons of money to fight him, he essentially won. He hurt his critics financially and made people think twice about even posting legitimate criticism about him online.
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His previous lawsuit, against Gawker, was funded by Peter Thiel. Gawker settled that one as part of the package deal, but I don’t know if email guy got more than pennies on the dollar.
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At least his mother still thinks he invented email.
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He lost that one pretty big. According to the state election results website the Democratic candidate Warren received 60.3% of the vote, the Republican candidate Diehl received 36.2%, and the self-proclaimed inventor of email received 3.4%.
At least he can say that twice as many people chose to vote for him as left the Senate section of their ballots blank.
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Uh, frivolous lawsuits for the win?
He should have stuck with “I possibly coined the term ‘email’,” but I guess it doesn’t have the same weight to it.
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There really is a guy, who lived in Massachusetts, who has a legitimate claim to being the inventor of email, but the lawsuit guy isn’t him.
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He sued them. If they don’t turn up, he wins a default judgment and they pay much bigger than they would if they hire a lawyer.
So they hire a lawyer and win. It’s a foregone conclusion, because the suit is nonsense, but this still costs a five figure sum, because lawyers are expensive. So they ask for their legal fees–and don’t get them, which was always the likely outcome and the underlying dynamic that facilitates SLAPP-style lawsuits. Meanwhile, the plaintiff appeals the ruling, incurring more legal fees.
The point of a SLAPP is that if you ignore it, you lose. If you lose, you lose. If you win, you lose.
We’ve been there:
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Hey, maybe this guy should sue the fake guy for damages! (funded by techdirt etc…)
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016)
Ray wouldn’t say he invented email- as I recall, he found it mostly funny that people had decided he did. But he was a wonderful guy who did a TON of really interesting research.
I mean, electronic messaging of text has been around since the late 60’s, I think.
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I have my doubts that he was even the first to use the term email. Compuserve used that, so I’d check their Compu-Serve/MicroNet ads in the late 70s to see when they started using it.
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My memory of this case will always be that when I bought a Techdirt “I invented email” t-shirt and wore it to work at Amazon (Kindle dev team), my Indian colleagues confronted me and insisted the playful slogan meant that I believed only people of European descent could invent things. To some degree they were joking.
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Or there abouts …
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apparently I needed a /s or “just making a sarcastic ass of myself” tag…
