Quentin Tarantino has enacted legal action against
Gawker Media for
this post which linked to a PDF copy of his leaked (and
thoroughly badass!) ‘
The Hateful Eight‘ screenplay.
The director filed a copyright lawsuit against website Defamer whose former editor once published an icky first person account of having her toes sucked by the director, for their part in disseminating a link you could probably find in less than seconds on the IMDB forums, saying, “Their headline boasts… ‘Here,’ not someplace else, but ‘Here’ on the Gawker website. The article then contains multiple direct links for downloading the entire Screenplay through a conveniently anonymous URL by simply clicking button-links on the Gawker page, and brazenly encourages Gawker visitors to read the Screenplay illegally with the invitation to ‘Enjoy!’ it.”
The complaint goes on the claim that the publisher failed to comply with “repeat demands for the removal of the posted URL links” and “submissions of DMCA notices of copyright infringement.”
“Gawker Media has made a business of predatory journalism, violating people’s rights to make a buck,” the lawsuit said. “This time, they went too far. Rather than merely publishing a news story reporting that Plaintiff’s screenplay may have been circulating in Hollywood without his permission, Gawker Media crossed the journalistic line by promoting itself to the public as the first source to read the entire Screenplay illegally.”
Gawker.com
responded with a six pronged defence explaining why they were innocent, your honour, arguing that they themselves did not leak the script but merely posted a link supplied to them by a tipster, that Tarantino himself created the story with
his initial outburst and drummed up more public interest in obtaining the script than they ever could (“I do like the fact that everyone eventually posts it, gets it and reviews it on the net,” Tarantnio told the Hollywood Reporter at the time. “I like the fact that people like my shit, and that they go out of their way to find it and read it.”) and that it was news their audience would be interested in.
“News of the fact that it existed on the Internet advanced a story that Tarantino himself had launched, and our publication of the link was a routine and unremarkable component of our job: making people aware of news and information about which they are curious,” the post reads. “Gawker and Defamer are news sites, and our publication of the link was clearly connected to our goal of informing readers about things they care about. As far as I can tell (but I’m no lawyer!), no claim of contributory infringement has prevailed in the U.S. over a news story. We’ll be fighting this one.“
