In the wake of an ongoing, expensive libel lawsuit that could drag on for years, Mike Masnick, the founder of Techdirt, announced Wednesday that his website would accept more than $250,000 in donations "to further reporting on free speech."

In a lengthy post, Masnick explained that the Freedom of the Press Foundation, along with other companies and organizations—including Automattic, the Charles Koch Foundation, Union Square Ventures, and a charity founded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark—will "enable us to focus even more reporting resources on covering threats to free speech in the US and around the globe, and to tell the stories of the chilling effects created when free speech is attacked."

Masnick underscored to Ars that the money was not for the company’s legal defense, but for continued journalistic operations in this field. He acknowledged that the Koch Foundation, which has historically supported numerous conservative political causes, is an unlikely partner with some of the other donors.

"[The Koch Foundation has] a history of supporting free speech efforts," Masnick told Ars. "We reached out to folks widely across the entire political spectrum in the belief that free speech is not a partisan issue."

Techdirt parent company Floor64 and Masnick himself are currently defending themselves against a lawsuit brought by Shiva Ayyadurai. In recent years, the Massachusetts entrepreneur has made a public and highly controversial claim that he invented e-mail as a teenager in the late 1970s—a claim that has been disputed by many of the top figures of the ARPANet era. Since the suit began, Ayyadurai announced that he would run for a seat in the United State Senate from his home state.

In January 2017, Ayyadurai sued Techdirt for libel over numerous articles that skewered Ayyadurai’s claims and labeled him a "liar" and a "charlatan," among other monikers. The case remains pending in federal court in Massachusetts.

Ayyadurai's lawyer, Charles Harder, is the same person who successfully brought an invasion of privacy case against Gawker Media, which ultimately filed for bankruptcy.