When a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a libel suit brought against Techdirt's Mike Masnick, the decision was a victory of sorts for the First Amendment. And it may be short-lived.

Even so, the ruling, which followed two-plus decades of legal precedent, brings to mind how lawsuits like this can be used as a weapon to stifle the First Amendment and extract huge settlements to make the issue disappear.

Masnick fought the allegations that he defamed Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who claims to have invented e-mail. Ayyadurai sought $15 million in a lawsuit against Masnick and Techdirt parent company Floor64 over blog posts that labeled Ayyadurai a "fraud" and a "liar" surrounding Ayyadurai's "fake" claims to have invented e-mail in 1978 as a teenager in New Jersey.

As strange as it may sound, however, Gawker paid out $750,000 to settle a similar lawsuit from Ayyadurai. He sued Gawker for ridiculing him with headlines that said Ayyadurai has "pretended to invent Email" and "The Inventor of Email did Not Invent Email." Gawker went bankrupt in the aftermath of the Hulk Hogan defamation lawsuit, disappeared those Ayyadurai stories from the site, and settled with Ayyadurai. Perhaps a settlement in that $140 million case might have prevented Gawker from going belly up or, even better, not publishing a sex tape of Hulk Hogan in the first place could have prevented a lot of pain and lost jobs. But that's another story altogether.

All of which goes to show that you can throw a lawsuit on the wall like mud, and some of it may stick, even if it is without legal merit. Although Techdirt prevailed, the suit still took its toll on Masnick, and the judge's ruling prevents Masnick from recovering his legal costs from Ayyadurai.

"As I have said, a case like this is extremely draining—especially on an emotional level—and can create massive chilling effects on free speech," Masnick said when he told his readers of his victory Wednesday.

But the pain isn't quite over for Techdirt. Ayyadurai's attorney says he'll appeal—and once again place Techdirt into a financially costly legal limbo because the court system sometimes can be a drawn-out and expensive crapshoot. After all, appellate courts are designed for the express purpose of checking the lower courts.

According to Charles Harder, Ayyadurai's lawyer, Wednesday's decision was an affront to the First Amendment (Harder also represented Hulk Hogan in the Gawker case).

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai will be appealing today's ruling. Dr. Ayyadurai has a long history of standing up for free speech. As a strong proponent of free speech, he also believes in truthful speech. False speech is not protected by the Constitution, and TechDirt's false and malicious speech about Dr. Ayyadurai should receive no legal protection. False speech does harm to readers, who are misled by it; it does harm to journalism, which is weakened by it; and it does harm to the subjects of the speech, whose reputations and careers are damaged by it. The public, and the courts, should not tolerate false speech, particularly when it causes people harm, and irresponsible media companies should stop using the Constitution as an excuse for their reckless dissemination of false information.

None of this is how US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor of Massachusetts viewed the case when ruling in Masnick's favor. Masnick cannot be legally liable for his alleged defamatory statements because "the question of who invented e-mail is not subject to one and only one 'true' answer."

According to Saylor, Techdirt's stories were protected by the First Amendment because the answer to the question of who invented e-mail is a complicated one.

The answer depends upon how "e-mail" itself is defined. Plaintiff defines "e-mail" to include features such as an inbox, outbox, folders, a "to:" line, a "from:" line, a "subject:" line, the body of a message and the ability to include attachments, and the ability to copy ("cc") or blind copy ("bcc") other recipients. For example, the online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "email" in far more general terms as "a means or system for transmitting messages electronically between two computers on a network."

"Accordingly," the judge added, "whether plaintiff's claim to have invented e-mail is 'fake' depends upon the operative definition of 'e-mail.' Because the definition does not have a single, objectively correct answer, the claim is incapable of being proved true or false."

Ars took a deep dive into the history of e-mail, including how on the ARPAnet, the predecessor to the Internet, electronic mail conventions were well-established by the mid-1970s.

Roger Myers, a First Amendment and media attorney in San Francisco, told Ars in a telephone interview that Saylor's ruling follows US Supreme Court precedent set in 1990. The case, called Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., concerned a high school wrestling coach who sued a local Ohio newspaper for defamation. The court concluded that the paper's allegedly defamatory statements "must be provable as false" before there can be liability.

"If the plaintiff cannot prove whether it's true or false, by definition the plaintiff cannot carry his burden of proof and the case has to be dismissed," Myers said. "That’s been defamation law for, probably since Milkovich."

To sound cliché, what all of this legalese means is that the truth, whatever that may be, is the best defense to defamation. What the truth is, however, will be decided by an appeals court.