Archives
Contribute
| Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, The Inventor Of Email, Victorious In Lawsuit Against Gawker Media |
Press Release
01/05/2017
$750,000 Paid to Dr. Ayyadurai and Removal of Multiple Defamatory Articles
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai was paid today $750,000 as a part of his settlement with Gawker Media for defamatory articles which Gawker Media's sites Gizmodo.com and Gawker.com wrote which ridiculed and disparaged the facts of the Indian American inventing the email in the 1970s.
“History will reflect that this settlement is a victory for truth. Americans have no tolerance for fake news, lies or cyberbullying. A 14-year old kid working in Newark, New Jersey in 1978 invented email. This settlement honors that innovation.” Ayyadurai stated in a statement released by his lawyers.
Dr. Ayyadurai was represented by attorneys Charles Harder of Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP in Los Angeles, California and Timothy Cornell of Cornell Dolan, PC in Boston, Massachusetts.
Dr. Ayyadurai sued Gawker Media, as well as founder Nick Denton, editor John Cook and staff writer Sam Biddle, in federal court in Boston in May of 2016, several months after the Terry Bollea, "Hulk Hogan" judgment was handed down in March. In his lawsuit against Gawker Media, Dr. Ayyadurai sought $35 million in damages.
After Gawker filed for bankruptcy in New York in June, Ayyadurai not only became a plaintiff in the case alongside Bollea and several others but also was appointed the Co-Chair of the Unsecured Creditors Committee to oversee the sale of Gawker Media.
The settlement payment of $750,000 also includes the removal of three of the articles. One article on Gawker.Com will be removed this month. Earlier, Univision executives voted to remove the two other articles about Dr. Ayyadurai when they bought Gawker’s other web property Gizmodo.Com and its three other web sites earlier this year.
Dr. Ayyadurai stated, "“Before email, there was the interoffice (inter-organizational) mail system: inbox, outbox, folders, address book, attachments, etc. But, it was all done using paper. ‘Experts’ thought it impossible to create a computer-based version of that system and did not attempt to take on this challenge. But, perhaps because of my ignorance, as a 14-year old kid, I never thought it impossible when my supervisor Dr. Leslie P. Michelson at a small medical college in Newark, NJ challenged me to do so. I wrote 50,000 lines of FORTRAN code across a system of about 35 software programs to create the first such electronic system. It was a success. I called it ‘email,’ a term never used before in the English language. I received the first U.S. Copyright for that invention, at a time when copyright was the only way to protect software inventions."
"This victory celebrates that boy, his hard work and the infinite possibilities of that America, which provided him the ecosystem to create and innovate.”
This settlement avoids for Gawker Media a full blown jury trial, where, given the overwhelming facts that Dr. Ayyadurai invented email (www.inventorofemail.com/presskit), Gawker Media would likely have lost more.
Dr. Ayyadurai lives in Belmont, MA. He is also the Chairman & CEO of CytoSolve, Inc., a company dedicated to eliminating animal testing through in siliconmodeling of complex molecular pathways. Already, CytoSolve has discovered a multi-combination drug for pancreatic cancer, which received FDA allowance to proceed to clinical trials. CytoSolve is based in Cambridge, MA.
The website www.inventorofemail.com/presskit provides more details on the victory, along with over 20 testimonials and quotes as well as research papers and facts documenting the invention of email by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai.
|
You may also access this article through our web-site http://www.lokvani.com/
