News Website Gawker Responds To Quentin Tarantino "Hateful Eight" Copyright Claim

Following Quentin Tarantino’s lawsuit against gossip website Gawker, filed on Monday morning, the site has published a six-point post, responding to the allegations. Tarantino’s suit references a Gawker piece, leaking the script for Hateful Eight –an as-of-yet unproduced script by Tarantino.

Tarantino is gearing up to take on the company in court.

According to Tarantino’s lawsuit, filed by attorneys Martin Singer and Evan Spiegel at Lavely & Singer in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles and publicized by The Hollywood Reporter, “Gawker Media has made a business of predatory journalism, violating people's rights to make a buck.”

The complaint makes a note of the script’s location.

"Their headline boasts...'Here,' not someplace else, but 'Here' on the Gawker website,” Tarantino claims. “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 lawsuit points out that Gawker advertised the script as available through their website.

Gawker’s main counterpoints, expressed in the article, is that the director supposedly wanted the script to go public and that the script was not, in fact leaked on the Gawker website. The script was hosted on two file-sharing websites – Scribd and AnonFiles and the original Gawker post featured a link to the latter. The six-point article published yesterday is titled “Quentin Tarantino Sues Gawker Over Link to Script He Wants Online” and references Tarantino, speaking to Deadline Hollywood about the availability of his work. It accuses the screenwriter/director of intentionally drawing more attention to the leak, so as to gain publicity for the project.

“It was Tarantino himself who turned this script into a news story, one that garnered him a great deal of attention,” the article claims. The post also clarifies that Gawker is not being sued for direct copyright infringement - the file-sharing site that the script was originally published on is being charged with this – just contributory copyright infringement. The post notes that “No one at Gawker has any earthly idea how AnonFiles obtained a copy.” The post concludes with the statement that the company is ready to take on Tarantino in court.

The case against Gawker is for contributory copyright infringement.