On Monday, the first lawsuit in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight leaked script saga launched, with the director suing Gawker Media for posting a link to it. The company responded, noting that it was Tarantino who turned the situation into a news story and that they did not leak the script.
Tarantino filed a copyright lawsuit against Gawker, which had posted a link to the script on its Defamer blog. The lawsuit, filed by attorney Marty Singer, called out Gawker for “predatory journalism” and crossing a “journalistic line by promoting itself to the public as the first source to read the entire screenplay illegally.”
Later Monday, Gawker posted a point-by-point response, first making it clear that they did not leak the script. The site only posted a link to AnonFiles and Scribd, where someone else had posted the script. They also accuse Tarantino of turning this into a story, since he told Deadline last week about the script leak before it became available outside of Hollywood circles.
One of the other points Gawker makes, aside from suggesting that Tarantino wanted the script to be leaked anyway, is that this is not a simple copyright infringement lawsuit. Rather, they are being sued for “contributory copyright infringement for linking to a site that is being sued for direct copyright infringement.”
“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,” Gawker’s John Cook wrote. “We'll be fighting this one.”
Since the script was leaked Tarantino has decided that The Hateful Eight will not be his next film, although he suggested that he might publish the script.
image: TWC