Tarantino revives "The Hateful Eight" infringement lawsuit against Gawker

Uproxx said in a report that filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is not yet over with the leak of his "The Hateful Eight" script. Tarantino's lawyers have refiled his lawsuit against the blog citing a new claim that Gawker had directly infringed his script. Following the lead of a judge's ruling in his initial lawsuit that was dismissed last week, Tarantino's camp reportedly presented additional evidence to support claim that Gawker had violated the filmmaker's rights to his script.

In his new lawsuit filed by his attorneys at Lavely & Singer, Tarantino argued that the news site had crossed the journalistic line in its behavior in relation to the award-winning director's yet-to-be-produced 146-page script. The new lawsuit is now forcing a judge to address whether to hold a news site like Gawker liable for downloading copyrighted material for violating an author's rights.

Uproxx said Gawker has escaped litigation regarding the publication of Tarantino's script by stressing in its initial motion to dismiss the lawsuit that by allowing individuals to have mere access to the script via a link is legally insufficient to find the news site liable for infringement. Tarantino's legal camp insisted in the new lawsuit that Gawker did directly violate the filmmaker's rights by downloading the script themselves.

The amended complaint as quoted by The Hollywood Reporter partially read, "Anyone who sought to read or obtain the Screenplay from the Screenplay Download URL necessarily had to first download a PDF copy of the work onto their own computer. On January 23, 2014, after Gawker obtained the Screenplay Download URL in response to its request for leak of an unauthorized infringing copy of the Screenplay, Gawker itself illegally downloaded to its computers an unauthorized infringing PDF copy of the Screenplay - read it and learned that the PDF download document was 146 pages - directly infringing Tarantino's copyright."

Uproxx said that the real entity that Tarantino must have been angry at was not Gawker, as the latter pointed out that the link has already been disseminated earlier via other sources, but the person who had originally leaked the script. Moreover, Tarantino could have been concerned about the eventual box office chances the unproduced script would lose considering that the script has already been read by many.

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Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight script infringement, The Hateful Eight screenplay, Gawker

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