Shiva Ayyadurai sued Gawker/Gizmodo because the site “cast doubt on his claims to have invented email in 1978” (Huffington Post). Gawker went bankrupt (Gizmodo) and had to wind up its litigation. Hulk Hogan got $31 million based on a jury award of $140 million (i.e., the jury decided that Hogan was more injured by publication of a sex video than if he had been killed; presumably his future earning capacity was less than $140 million). The inventor of email got $750,000 for a case that he probably would have lost, but the lawyers trying to clean up Gawker’s affairs for the Chapter 11 proceeding couldn’t wait that long.
[How do I know that Gawker was right in saying that Shiva Ayyadurai did not invent email in 1978? It was in 1976 that I got my present email address: philg@mit.edu, morphed slightly from “philg@mit-mc” after development of DNS (see RFC 733 for how email addresses looked back in 1977). Based on my personal knowledge, therefore, Shiva Ayyadurai invented email no later than 1976.]
philg, you are drifting off into reality-based blogging. The new reality is whatever the lawyers agree on. Based on my personal knowledge, S. A. ‘s claim to have invented email in 1978 has $750,000 worth of merit.