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

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all right so since the beginning part is just kind of introducing myself and everything else I am going to go move forward with that the name of this talk actually let me just say my name is Jason Scott that's my proof and the name of this talk is that awesome time I was sued for two billion dollars it's not a fake title I was sued for two billion dollars actually a little bit more so don't worry it's not a trick this isn't gonna be some cissp bullshit this is actually a real thing just saying just saying all right anyway so I run a site called text files calm which is an archive of computer history started out pretty simple I had a bunch of old computer bulletin board documents from when I was in my teens and I noticed in around 1998 that there really wasn't a huge collection of them online and this surprised me so I put them online that got some press immediately and it slowly grew in success so people started to send me their old computer bulletin board stuff this I have to ask this now cuz it's 2009 when I say computer bulletin board how many people know what I'm talking about okay just checking and now I like the little nervous heads like anyway it'll all come clear later what happened is is that over time people started to send me other historical artifacts so they would send me things that were sound well those aren't text files so I created audio that text files calm I started scanning old ads that became digitized I had an see art I had music created by people in the 80s and 90s art scene and finally PDF txt files comm probably the lamest name on the entire set which is stuff that was sent to me in PDF form and I've put a lot of things up there of all various stripes manuals and everything else and it's now really huge I probably have somewhere close to a terabyte of data online that I provide for free with no ads including I might say CD text files com I'm mentioning this one because this is an interesting situation I have a lot of shareware CDs and if you don't remember that period of time everyone was really excited by the fact that you get six hundred and 40 Meg's onto a single piece of plastic but then quickly ran out of things to put on them so what ended up happening was the there were people who would go around to computer bulletin boards you remember that thing I talked about and then they would grab all the files from them and shovel them onto one big CD and sell it for 15 bucks those were known as shovel where those guys were bottom-feeding assholes kind of like when you search and you see a hack add a article and it's got ads all over and it's not hackaday same idea except you know 1990s clothing so he's raving and so basically I grabbed hundreds of those and put them online so I have hundreds of gigabytes of this of shareware stuff so those guys turned out to be archivists who knew things have gotten more intense lately so one day I had to go rent a truck why did I have to go rent a truck because it was given to me to take most of the collection of Leonard Tower who was one of the cofounders of the Free Software Foundation who decided that he was trying to clean up things so he gave me all his old stuff that includes old issues of bight old journals everything else so I had to actually get an intern which is a crazy thing and we've been sorting through this thing creating paper text files calm where I have been basically taking all of these old magazines and cataloging them and we may scan some portions or things like that so in other words I've been having a happy life doing computer history and I vacuumed up terabytes of data all sorts of things and this is kind of what I do I love doing it and chances are somebody's probably bumped in to my site several times in their online career I have had kids who go to me who are going to college who have always known a time when text files calm is on and tell me that it really influenced them very touching very very friendly and so ideally that should be the end of it right there's me there's ALG affi who created the mat folding and we should all live happily ever after and everything should be awesome okay except that I'm on the internet so on the internet you get letters so when you have a terabyte of data especially stuff you've collected kind of strangely people send you letters in fact lawyers send you letters so I get letter I get letters from lawyers all the time I get letters from regular people - and they're very friendly and sometimes they're angry but when they're angry so what they're angry I don't care if the person is angry for a legitimate reason crate if a person says you know when I was 13 and I called myself the mad dickwad and I called myself by basically my friends real name and now I kind of regret it I'm like oh that's a real shame so this is an article this is a letter sent to me from a blonde Spivak McClellan's mayor and Neustadt from a a very nice person named Roberta Bren in it this is a letter bear in mind that merely warns me something and it already says that it's going to be CR bard incorporated versus text files org there's no text files org fine whatever infringement and dilution of the bard X trademark with a reference number which to the glancing person who doesn't quite know what they're up against looks almost like it's some sort of legal case number that's been filed somewhere none of that is true this is basically a letter saying we don't like something about your site get rid of it what is it well that's an interesting thing we have not received a response from you and improper references to the bard x mark used to refer to enema equipment continued to appear in several stories posted within your erotica section in particular inaccurate references to the bard X appear in the stories an interesting Saturday night part 5 lori's last day and Pamela story so it turns out that the bard X which is a trademark of CR bard is only to be used as a urological catheter it is not to be used in enemas yet for some reason a wide variety of erotica fiction I want to point out that I have 7,000 erotic stories on my site ie if someone's gonna put something into anybody else in any way to enjoy it I have a story in which they do it so it stands to reason when you have this sort of quantum sex act that eventually somebody is going to go I don't like the part where you took the three ponies and the ice cream cone went into the ice cream truck and drove into a school that doesn't really make me happy and I'm like just keep going just keep going so yeah so so so the important thing they want you to don't put the urology catheter in your butt but more or less what they're really pissed off about is the fact that the people who are doing this and having these wonderful enema stories are referring to it as a bar decks that is to say it's using their trademark to indicate an act for which their item shouldn't be used this is something that's called the Lanham Act I went to the site yesterday to check up on things by the way and this is their ad for the bar decks and I think he's erotic fiction I just wanted to point that out quick thing about the bar just so you understand what the Lanham Act is the Lanham Act was originally was originally created as a way of when you trademark something and put it on the side of say a barrel of rum and then jerkwad over here put mud and a little bit of lye in and called it your rum he was diluting your trademark because someone would drink it and go man this barley rum sucks and you would be diminished well guess what happened it got innovated a fun so if you want to imagine like a field and then by the end of it it's a strip mall with an airplane landing on it and everything else well that's what they did at this point indicating and any untoward act in which you mention a product by name can be considered a violation of the Lanham Act so for instance if you indicate someone should make a bomb using a specific household cleaner which was one of my files the household cleaner people are angry and say please don't call it a our name bomb and you go well that sounds somewhat okay I mean that sounds somewhat and then there's another one where associates site of mine had a woman who was having sexual congress with a coke bottle well did you know that the coke bottle shape is actually trademarked as a distinct thing so the fact that you could see it being misused in this obviously not sustainable fashion indicated that Ellucian of their trademark and of course people would be like wow I get it you shoved in your cooter and so anyway so that's this is the kind of foolishness that happens a lot of times I've been I've been attacked a bunch of times by font companies because a lot of these shovelware come would be like wow this program doesn't work if you don't have this windows font fine fucking throw it on really gonna sell 1000 copies and then you know 15 years later I put it up so that's what happens sometimes I've had people who mentioned to me that they uploaded a story in anger once to one BBS in California in 1983 and I have it so all you young uns like look out just saying you're like no one notices if I'm posting on 4chan I just want to point this out this was actually this actually got a little news for me I have 10 million archived threads of 4chan for five years I've been asked not to put it up publicly and hold it for good and I will and I am going to put it up so I'm just saying you know in the grand scheme of things whatever you put up there 20 years later some idiot like me is gonna come along so I'm just saying you're gonna be 40 you gonna be like oh fuck he was right but sometimes I get letters in the mail and mail letters are a little more interesting because that means the person still knows how to use the mail and that the person probably really wants me to know something so when you get mail that says evidence do not destroy and it lists a court case then you got to spend a little time with it because in a world where you can be sued for misusing enema equipment you might have something that's legitimate that you have to watch out for so I started to get a lot of letters from this one individual and as you can see they are written in perfect crazy fluent crazy that's that's actually you know I mean yeah notice the legal mail stamp just so you know it's legal mail so it was a notification of claimed infringement which was and what says here by person it doesn't mean they did the infringement it says this is the person who made this it's Paul Andrew Mitchell as a disclaimer I might be completely miss stating everything about Paul Andrew Mitchell but as far as I can tell he is a fuck so Paul Andrew Mitchell author and damaged party all rights reserved without prejudice I don't even know what that means so one of the first letters he sent me was something called the federal zone copyright amnesty program to all users he started out with dear neighbors I don't get it so I understand that like the way this is written here you're over there like what the fuck does that say I've summarized it for you give me $25 delete all your copy swear an oath you did it I no longer allow copies of my book for free I'll go a little more details into the federal zone the federal zone was a book that was written as a sold product that is to say he sold it on floppy disks so this is around 1994 1995 its central thesis I'm sorry to ruin that for you spoiler alert is that we exist based on some bizarre readings of the Supreme Court rulings that the only places that the federal laws truly have jurisdiction is over Washington DC and a number of other federally assigned territories and that a lot of other laws including taxes are not really valid therefore you don't have to pay taxes sign guy who had his back his bank account held for lack of paying of taxes just in case you're wondering what happened with the guy writing the book so um at the time that he started to write these letters to me at one point he indicated that the Lanham Act from its triple damages this is an interesting assumption it's not true but he estimated that there had been two million three hundred and seventy one thousand three hundred and twenty four downloads of his book on my site and probably a couple hundred others that in fact mine had actually come from all places the loft the loft had a archive of old texts and I had that archive and among them was this file feds own text and so he simply assumed this wonderful number no he doesn't explain where he got the number because that planet asks not to be identified however he claims that because these two million three hundred seventy-one thousand 324 people failed to pay the $25 he was now owed fifty nine million two hundred and eighty three thousand one hundred dollars in damages also I am batshit insane that's what it says at the bottom so you know the letters started coming and what's interesting here to note which is what the core thing I want you to really if you don't come away with anything else I'm talking about here bear in mind that I'm a you know in in the grand scheme of getting legal threats and being told I am a bad person I am probably one of the more Rhino skinned people at this point I am told I am awful all the time in all various bits I've been told this on comment boards I've been told this in text files I've been told this in voicemail it's you know it's what happens when you do a lot of different things on the internet and you talk like I obviously do in this bombastic crazy ass funny manner that makes fun of people but there are a lot of you who don't actually live that kind of life like I do and yet you wish to express yourselves and you will express yourselves and you will encounter something like this and there's a real danger that you'll come away from it feeling like you've done something wrong or that every single person who takes the time to threaten you in this kind of fashion which is not just you suck I hate you is somehow valid and I want you to walk away at least knowing if even if you walk out now because you're gonna go see Clark speak that no that's not true don't fall for that bullshit find out all the facts before you respond and go back so I just want to make that clear because when you start getting letters like this notification claimed infringement and then the next one says notice of intent to sue for racketeering and related claims racketeering was invented to get rid of the mob the idea being that if you have a gas station you sell pot out of it the gas station is liable for your pot selling this is actually partially why a lot of franchises are owned by single people so they can go after it yet yet theoretically if someone wanted to they could almost claim the McDonald's Corporation was the responsible in a racketeering way for a crime committed at a McDonald's this almost never goes that way it sometimes happens in drug laws but not often and so racketeering is one of those things of like it's understood why that tool came along but it's not necessarily something that's gonna happen and this guy is claiming I was a racketeering organization because he thinks I stole his book did I steal his book that's another question for another few minutes after getting about 20 of these letters over the course of two or three years we're in now 2001 I started getting them in 1998 I was sent mail from the constitutional educational Research Foundation located in California I should also point out by the way that all the mail that previously came came through a series of mail drops mail drops are fascinating and if you haven't really been dealing with the mail in your lifetime because you're 9 the way that most people send mail is that you send it out and it has to have a return address but when you get your mail back you have to kind of give them address and there are companies and places that will do nothing but take your mail in and send it to another one and they'll do this for X amount a month and so you don't ever give your information out and then you cut off that mail drop and go to the next place and that's why you do it so that way if there's old bills they have this address for you well he was a great education on all these different mail drops because they were all over the place forwarding agent forwarding agent is a pretty good sign by the way so one day from a forwarding agent I got mail from Lonnie G Schmidt's settlement negotiator and he sent it to all named defendants in this Mitchell vs. AOL Time Warner Inc at Al lawsuit which didn't exist yet by the way but it offered me great settlement opportunities for this for only $25 which was the price of the original you all these people could have avoided the lawsuit now they're faced with extensive legal expenses and the very real prospect of massive damage Awards with no ceiling in sight for you and later in the letter for your information mr. Mitchell has begun to pre assign a portion of his awards to worthy charitable organizations depending on your unique situation it may also be possible to offset his damages with a tax-deductible donation now it's interesting because then it says well if you settle some of the money we'll help kids but the thing is is again I want you to understand this from the point of view of a person who has no other knowledge of this going on this is truly terror because this person is speaking in extremely scary language and if you're a person who's going paycheck to paycheck and these weird threats are coming through the mail and he would write everything in the form of a legal document you'd start to think that you were really truly and well fucked and you didn't know what to do ostensibly you would give him $25 ie this is probably vaguely extortion in fact by this point he had actually been able to show some of the unpaid settlements that he believed he was owed for this legal case that hadn't happened yet and so his number was now at 97 million just keep it going okay 97 million one hundred and twelve thousand oh fuck you know Co forty one and thirty one cents check please he also included a Miranda warning that's awesome I was mailed a Miranda warning in the mail I picked it up and I was told that anything I would say and do from this point forward could be used against me I guess up to today but damn it if he didn't do it if he didn't just say that and he said yep because of the Fifth Amendment you can do this and because of this it will be held against you so who the hell is this moon bat because at this point you're like dude that's fucking nuts and really honestly that's kind of my take on it - his name is Paul Andrew Mitchell his alias is Mitch molesky it might be that his real name is Mitch mortal Eskie he claims otherwise we know that he served time in or attended a seminary and then dropped out we know that he has a business degree an actual business degree he note we know he has another degree oh we think he has mental illness can't be sure though and at some point he started really falling in with the Fringe crowd joined up with the freemen for a while tried to be a representation with them when they failed to pay him for something but he thought he was owed he claimed that they were government clones trying to defraud him so he started to go after them which is a really dumb thing to do to men in cabins with guns but fine whatever I guess that's why you have a forwarding agent and he he had invented this kind of interesting way of looking at the world in terms of a legal thing and you know I understand that some of this for some people I mean you know I mean you probably want Jennifer Granick and a bra and panties to read this to you to make it interesting legally but I'm just saying that a lot of it if you actually went down and went down in these twisted logic tunnels that he had dug they actually kind of made a six sort of sense a few times he kind of makes leaps that are a little bit too far for the current contemporary legal system but it still it was an interesting thing to read up on so he wrote this book and put this book out called the federal zone of which I've already spoiled for you and he he put it out with clear language that it was give me $25 if you think there's any use in it since it is objectively useless he didn't get much money he then announced he was withdrawing it from the internet and he did this by posting on some men lists again this is 1997 there's a slightly different feel about the internet but still even in that time it's pretty contemporarily nuts and he posted this warning instead of tension this is no longer a freely available work and now you may not have it and then he proceeded to send angry letters to more and more people including America Online who he said was hosting it on various servers which they may have been because they host a lot of stuff and so he basically said so AOL owes me money in these 150 defendants of which 120 were john doe's owe me money yeah it's now you know a little bit more about Paul so one day a subpoena shows up now again I understand the subpoena may in fact be a cupcake I mean if you know it's not really technically supposed to be that right you got served right legal mail and right under it served to it case anyone's wondering cows technology is the business that owns CalNet which was the site that nominally had a mirror of text files calm and that's why he keeps saying cows that's that's what's that's what's going on there so this was actually to me and to my real address and it was fucking thick so I knew I was I was okay I was in for a good read here's an interesting thing that he started to do after a short period of time he started to emboss them again I think that's really important to understand is that a person you might not know better would see something in Boston go okay that must be some real shit his his law firm whose sole lawyer on staff doesn't have a law degree it's called supreme law firm it's actually I believe its supreme law org where you can by the way download a complete free copy of his book I mean just in case you're wondering but this this one this one was from the district court of the United States it was from the eastern Judicial District of California and it had a real case number and it had a real judge who really did sign it so occasionally the internet will sue your ass who knew and this is also something I just wanted to point out he would always to himself as a private attorney general just explain where that comes from there was a very specific very very unusual situation where there is one description in an unusual case where someone could be called somebody acting in lieu of an attorney general in a district that does not have an attorney general and acting in a private fashion but it's mostly a case of this person is referee is in Tarang in the name of the government and so on it's a very specific thing this to call yourself the private attorney general means that you read that particular legal case from a moving car so just so you know but private attorney general sounds pretty goddamn scary it's like the Batman he doesn't have any actual laws he has to follow he'll prosecute your ass when and where he wants to so again that was you know that proof of service and this is very interesting too one of the reasons he chose the Eastern District of California at this time was that you could actually sort of mail summons you didn't you could send it registered or whatever or tracking number and you didn't actually have to send a person which is much cheaper he always goes for the cheap he would always go for the cheap a lot of his stuff was like internet cafe a lot of stuff was like that so anyway lots of crazy shit in here just tons of stuff that's all the people verified and the stuff I just like to point this one out because this is actually in the middle of the lawsuit no one ever requested plaintiff's permission to modify the subject book and then make then to make modified derivatives available for free on the World Wide Web of the internet no one no one ever obtained plaintiff's permission to modify the subject book and then they make modified derivatives available for free on the World Wide Web of the internet no one absolutely no one so if you're glad you're not in a room with him yeah so by this point he's summarized the damages such that the summary for reasonable counsels fees that is to say himself suing me are to be addressed summary of consequential damages to be addressed in the summary of actual damages on counts three four and five he hasn't figured out yet but caught one the copyright infringement actual he's counting infringement says every time I think somebody I think somebody downloaded to something they owe me the full value in damages 163 million and Lanham Act violations which again under certain circumstances treble which may not be this case suddenly it's 491 this gives him six hundred and fifty five million two hundred thousand and then he tacked on to it again going three times by taking the by the way he figured out the punitive damages by taking the infringement damages and tripling them he came up with one point nine billion dollars one hunt one and and finally adding them back up again alright so that's critical right you got to understand he took three eggs threw together the eggs and then ended up somehow with six eggs six glorious Lanham Act violative eggs critical to understand and he ended up with 2.6 billion dollars and I also just wanted to mention this somewhere we are deep down there over a period of several months time permitting plaintiff surveyed the entire internet using the AltaVista search engine developed by Digital Equipment Corporation now owned by Compaq so that's like you know 1997 he looked at the entire Internet all right yeah so so here's the deal okay it was a real lawsuit a bunch of us were named he had the supreme law firm now again part of the problem here is that if you're alone you almost think oh my god this maniac is somehow going to maybe get a billion dollars from me in your dart you know you can sit there with your buddies and when there's you know a thousand of us in the room like there is right now you can say oh you know I mean of course that's stupid bullshit but the fact is is when you're alone and you don't have anyone to talk to you can feel really scared by that got it the so anyway so what you end up with there is we ended up banding together and creating the supreme gall mailing list and supreme gall and us would pass along things he had sent make fun of him and otherwise come up with stuff so of the twelve people on the supreme Gaullist who were all parties three of us sent lawyers I wasn't one of them my lawyer actually advised that I should but that's what a lawyer does something um his lawyer says you should send a lawyer this plumber says you need a plumber um this hooker says you need a hooker anyway so they sent him along there and of course he was insane Wow a second person to tell me have ten minutes that means I have 20 minutes so here's the deal though while he was pretty crazy during the actual lawsuit and said crazy things would actually sunk his case so don't do this is during the court case he up up the charges by indicating that we now owed interest on the original stuff that we owed so he produced this out of his butt seven percent per annum need to give more and so he sent that directly to us instead of through our lawyers or in in absentia and as a result they threw his case out he then said that the the judge was part of the conspiracy said some awful things to the judge and got declared a vexatious litigant which means you are an asshole in the eyes of the court so I I couldn't come up with a good slide representing happiness and success so this is a picture of me at 16 with my bulletin board system because I was really happy back then anyway so yeah so the upshot of this thing was that I really like learned a lot and and he did send me some letters afterwards and I do collect them all but it's kind of the nature of this whole thing right is that you have to understand that they're like never try to go things alone I don't mean that you have to go walk into the cops if you think you've done something wrong but talk to other people be about what you you know what you think is going on or where things are talk to people because the fact is is that working in ignorance allows scum like this to really take advantage of you it doesn't always come with a perfect neon sized clown hat crazy like this guy sometimes it doesn't sometimes it's just a little side of somebody has a different moral structure than you and is really going nuts and is telling you things that just inherently are true so if you want to read more about him I guess I lost that slide oh well if you go to Paul Andrew Mitchell calm which I own don't call the two phone numbers one of them goes to a Paul Mitchell hair salon the second one goes to an abandoned insane asylum but you can read all of these documents in there all their glory and read all about him and get lots of information to see what crazy can look like so anyway here's a whole bunch of ways to reach me txt files calm my web blogs ASCII text files calm I invite you all to visit the retro room which I helped put together here which has a functioning pdp-11 and a VAX please don't avoid that probably the last time you're gonna touch that metal while it's on or when it's not your bedpan so anyway and of course feel free to follow my cat on twitter because people just love that cat anyway so thank you again for going out coming back in again and putting up with the bullshit to talk and listen to me thank you so much

Info

Channel: Christiaan008

Views: 1,542,577

Rating: 4.8653646 out of 5

Keywords: DEFCON, 17, Hacking, Conference, Presentation, By, Jason, Scott, That, Awesome, Time, I, Was, Sued, for, Two, Billion, Dollars, Video, and, Slides

Id: KSWqx8goqSY

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 31min 27sec (1887 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 14 2011

Reddit Comments

I love this video. I watched it twice already.

👍︎︎ 26 👤︎︎ u/mynameisalso 📅︎︎ Jun 07 2016 🗫︎ replies

Defcon talks are some of the funniest talks out there.

👍︎︎ 11 👤︎︎ u/DanskJeavlar 📅︎︎ Jun 07 2016 🗫︎ replies

This guy's aspirations are nowhere near high enough. He should take lessons from that one lady who sued the government for 666 billions after the Oregon incident.

👍︎︎ 17 👤︎︎ u/BirthdayCookie 📅︎︎ Jun 07 2016 🗫︎ replies

I love the fucking moon bats that try to do this shit to people who don't roll over. This guy doing the talk was awesome.

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/boot20 📅︎︎ Jun 07 2016 🗫︎ replies

My wife got a call one day from some guy saying "We are going to sue you. If you don't call us back, all I can is - good luck".

She, her mother (who was a detective and now an FBI analyst), and her sister thought we should call them back. I said fuck no, it's some scammer, don't bother. Then they sent a letter that sounded like this. They were freaking out. I told them ignore it. Sure enough it went away and nothing happened. Some people just worry. I was involved with a lawsuit for a company I cofounded where they tried to sue us and Sun Microsystems for some biometric fingerprint recognition software we wrote, but then didn't give us the stock we were owed. Said fuck you and kept the source code. The lawsuit was tossed since it was a simple contract suit (they didn't hold up their end- contract is not valid). However, that was scary. Some yahoo sending threatening letters is funny as hell.

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Jun 08 2016 🗫︎ replies

I like the part at the end where he calls him "scum."

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/savorxit 📅︎︎ Jun 07 2016 🗫︎ replies

Defcon is never not entertaining. This guy is especially cool though, he reminds me of one of those early Internet pioneer wizards, especially with his flame button up shirt.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/AffablyAmiableAnimal 📅︎︎ Jun 08 2016 🗫︎ replies

Is there a TL/DW (didn't watch) for this? I'm lazy, I know.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Jun 16 2016 🗫︎ replies