Last week, we talked about how Quentin Tarantino cancelled his next upcoming movie after the script for The Hateful Eight leaked. QT emphasized that he felt “very depressed” and betrayed because he had only given the script to three actors (and a total of six people). He explained how one of the actors (not Tim Roth) had given the script to his agent. What happened from there is anyone’s guess.

What a mess, and it’s all very sad but a mystery nonetheless. All I really know is that some of Quentin’s previous scripts (Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained) leaked online before the films were made, but that doesn’t mean QT can’t change his mind. It’s his intellectual property and his blood and tears, and Quentin reserves the right to cancel the movie. That should have been the end of the discussion, but then Gawker decided to publish a story telling people exacly where to find the script on a file-sharing website.

For obvious reasons, I’m not going to link to Gawker’s original story even though it still exists online. The gist of this story is that QT’s lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to Gawker Media, but they refused to remove their post. Gawker has a documented history of telling celebrities to shove it when C&Ds come their way. Most recently, they messed with Lena Dunham by refusing to remove excerpts of her book proposal. Now they’ve messed with the wrong muthaf—a because QT has filed a lawsuit against Gawker:

Quentin Tarantino has filed a copyright lawsuit against Gawker Media for allegedly facilitating the dissemination of copies of his unproduced script,

Last week, the famous director was outraged after details about the Western circulated. He was so irate that he told the media that he wouldn’t be making the picture as his next film.

Soon afterwards, Gawker’s Defamer blog linked to the 146-page script under a post titled, “​Here Is the Leaked Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight Script.”

“Gawker Media has made a business of predatory journalism, violating people’s rights to make a buck,” says Tarantino’s lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”

The lawsuit, filed by attorneys Martin Singer and Evan Spiegel at Lavely & Singer in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, emphasizes the whereabouts of the script.

According to the complaint, “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.”

In the past, Gawker has toed the line when it comes to sensitive material. The website has sparked lawsuits, for example, over s*x tapes from Hulk Hogan and Rebecca Gayheart. It also faced off against Lena Dunham over the posting of a book proposal. After Dunham’s attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter, Gawker removed the book proposal from its site. “We ran too much of it,” Gawker founder Nick Denton later admitted in an interview with THR.

This time, according to Tarantino’s lawsuit, Gawker has refused to back down from “repeat demands for the removal of the posted URL links” and “submissions of DMCA notices of copyright infringement.”

The lawsuit seems designed to counter Gawker’s potential defense of “safe harbor” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The dispute also figures to raise issues of contributory liability as explored in the Supreme Court’s Grokster ruling. An examination of the liability of linking to copyrighted material also came up in adult entertainment publisher Perfect 10’s legal battles with Amazon and Google. That dispute went up to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which remanded the issue of whether in-line linking with knowledge of copyrighted material could be unlawful.

“The reason for the Copyright Act is to protect against the Defendants’ conduct,” states Tarantino’s lawsuit, which demands actual and statutory damages as well as Gawker’s profits in the amount of at least $1 million.

[From Hollywood Reporter]

Gawker has responded to Quentin’s lawsuit via its editor, John Cook, who claims QT wanted the script published online. Cook also insists that Gawker was merely reporting the news. Gawker could have stopped where most outlets stopped — by reporting the news of The Hateful Eight‘s cancellation. They went further by posting the script, and then they did not acknowledge the C&D letters from Quentin’s lawyers. Will the lawsuit go forth? Who knows. Copyright law (especially on the internet) can be such a grey area, but it sounds like Gawker was daring QT to sue. That’s exactly what he did.

Photos courtesy of WENN