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DEFCON 17: That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars

Christiaan008 · 1.7M views · 2011-01-15 · 31:28

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Overview

Jason Scott of textfiles.com tells the story at DEFCON 17 of being sued for two billion dollars by a scammer who plagued him and others for over a decade. The talk is tragic and funny, covering what he learned about misleading schemes.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it as a great, hilarious talk about legal threats and cease and desist letters.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2015–2026

Topics

Hacker culture & free softwareLaw, policing & justiceInternet culture & memes
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jason scottdefconlawsuittextfilesinternet history

What people said

__z · 2015-05 · Strong recommendation

This guy has gotten cease and desist letters from catheter companies as well as been sued for two billion dollars. Watch his talk on the matter, it is really great - [VIDEO]

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hobs · 2015-01 · Strong recommendation

If you don't know him already, textfiles has one of my favorite people on the internet (Jason Scott) running a lot of things, and hoarding interesting material for our future. As far as I can tell the dude just loves MS-DOS games and hence we have this great project. (I imagine there are a lot of contributors, but he is clearly pushing it forward) He gave a great talk at DEFCON 17 called "That one time I was sued for two billion dollars." in which he gives a few more details about textfiles if you are interested. [VIDEO]

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Rendello · 2026-01 · Recommendation

For a less-serious but similar situation, Jason Scott (textfiles.com, Internet Archive) gave a hilarious DEFCON talk called "That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars": [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Christiaan008, played through YouTube.

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