Techdirt lawsuit settled

Back in 2017 Techdirt wrote a series of articles about Shiva Ayyadura. Shiva claims he invented email. (narrator voice: he didn’t). I wrote about the lawsuit when it was dismissed on First Amendment grounds. The parties cross appealed, and have been in settlement talks for 18 months.

According to Techdirt, the non-monetary settlement they agreed to is that all the articles in dispute will have a link to a statement published by Shiva.

You may wonder how it could possibly take 18 months to negotiate a settlement about adding links to old articles — and, indeed, I wonder that myself. The entire process has been quite a pain for us. I cannot and would not describe this result as a victory, because this has been nearly two and a half years of wasted time, effort, resources, attention and money just to defend our right to report on a public figure and explain to the world that we do not believe his claims to have invented email are correct, based on reams of evidence.


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Improving Outlook Email Display

Today Litmus announced they had partnered with Microsoft to fix many of the rendering issues with Outlook. Congrats, Litmus! This is awesome. I know a lot of folks have tried to get MS to the table to fix some of the problems with Outlook. Take a bow for getting this off the ground.
According to Litmus, the partnership has two parts.

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Who didn't invent email, part 2

Back in 2014, Steve wrote an article discussing Shiva Ayyadurai,and his claims that he was the inventor of email. In that article he links to a number of articles from Techdirt. Earlier this year, Shiva sued Floor64, the parent company of Techdirt, as well as Michael Massnick the Founder, CEO and editor and Leigh Beadon, a writer for Techdirt. (Original Complaint pdf from ReCAP). Ars Technica has a good article on Shiva and his claims.

The complaint asserts that the defendants defamed Shiva in their articles, caused him economic harm and inflicted emotional distress on him.
Today the judge dismissed the case (Memorandum and Order, pdf from ReCAP) against Michael and Leigh.  The legal standard for punishable defamatory statements is there must be a way to prove them true or false. The judge ruled that since there is not a single definition of email, that there is no way to definitively prove Techdirt’s statements as true or false.
No one disputes the Shiva coded a system that encompasses the features we expect of any desktop or web based mail client. As many people have mentioned, the fact he was 14 and put together a complex program is impressive in and of itself. No one is disputing what he did accomplish.
To my mind the fundamental core of email is interoperability. It’s that I can sit in my lab at the University of Wisconsin, type a message, hit send and have someone in Boston receive the message. I can sit here in my office in California and write to my client in the the UK. The bits of the email client, which define email according to Shiva, are not email. They’re important for usability, but they’re not what makes  email email.
According to Ars Technica, Shiva is going to appeal the dismissal.
EDIT: Techdirt has posted an article on the lawsuit and the dismissal.
 

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CASL Private Right of Action Delayed

Today the Canadian Government announced they were suspending the provision that allows individuals to sue marketers for violations of CASL.
Under these provisions, individual Canadian consumers had a private right of action. Any Canadian could sue any company that sent mail violating the law. This part of the law upset many senders and marketers. I’m sure many are relieved at this delay in enforcement.
 
This delay has no effect on the other major CASL provision with a July 1, 2017 deadline.
On July 1 a 3 year waiver on implied consent collected prior to CASL will end. What does that mean? Implied consent is just what it sounds like. Under certain conditions, senders can assume they have legal consent to mail the recipient. These conditions are spelled out in Section 10(9) of the law. Implied consent expires after 2 years. However, companies were granted a 3 year waiver on this provision for email addresses collected prior to July 1, 2014.
The waiver allowed senders to continue mailing addresses with implied consent even after the 2 year expiration.  This was to allow companies time to convert implied consent into express consent as to not lose recipients. There are about 3 weeks left for senders to get explicit permission to continue mailing addresses collected prior to July 1, 2014.
Additionally, as of July 1, 2017 CASL requires a parliamentary committee to review the law and its operation over the last 3 years.

Many senders are thrilled with the indefinite suspension of the PRA. It was, I think, one of the parts of the law that worried people the most. Allowing any citizen to sue someone who sent them mail they thought violated CASL? That concept struck fear into the hearts of many a legitimate marketer. I was never quite so sure it was going to be as bad as some thought.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to sit in a conference session with an individual from the Canadian government. They explained that there were significant barriers to individuals suing senders. Plaintiffs must file in provincial courts, not local ones. Second, defendants couldn’t be under investigation by the CRTC and a PRA at the same time. The presenter implied that CRTC had priority over any joint defendant. Finally, the plaintiff must prove actual damages. This is difficult for defendants that use a freemail provider like Gmail. There aren’t really damages in that case.
The overall gist of the session was that PRA in Canada was not that simple. Individuals wanting to sue had some bigger hoops to jump through than just filing something in small claims court. Nevertheless, I’m sure that many senders are relieved to hear the PRA is indefinitely suspended.

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