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

10 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2015–2026 score 4
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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

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.

“Watch his talk on the matter, it is really great” (HN, 2015)

2 strong recommendations · 1 recommendations · 1 citations · 1 critical · Talks

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@hobs Jan 2015 Strongly recommends
on HN thread The MS-DOS Showcase
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. [this video]
Jason Scott's talk with details about textfiles.
@__z May 2015 Strongly recommends
on HN thread I Want Your AOL CDs
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 - [this video]
Talk on being sued and receiving cease and desist letters.
@Rendello Jan 2026 Recommends
on HN thread Anna's Archive is sued for $13T
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": [this video]
Hilarious talk about being sued for a huge sum.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@reitzensteinm Apr 2020 Cites it
on HN thread textfiles.com
The owner of the site gave a talk at DEFCON 17, "That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars" [this video]
@mhh__ Sep 2021 Pushes back
on HN thread UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy
It's no better than [this video] (That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars) level argument, just with better lawyer-speak. The US is sheltering a diplomat(spy?) who negligently ran over and killed a British civilian as we speak, but these guys are the real danger.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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