According to The Hollywood Reports, news blog Gawker has requested a California federal court to dismiss the lawsuit filed by filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino sued Gawker over the alleged publication of his unproduced script for a planned movie titled "Hateful Eight."
The charge filed against Gawker is contributory copyright infringement, and insisted it violated copyright laws when its Defamer blog linked to Tarantino's 146-page script under the title "Here Is the Leaked Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight Script." Tarantino claimed in his lawsuit that Gawker promoted itself publicly as the first news outlet that had read his screenplay entirely via illegal means.
Gawker argued in its countersuit on Monday that the reading a screenplay does not denote to an act to infringe copyrighted material and that claim for contributory infringement is non-existent when there is no direct infringement.
"Gawker's challenged use was transformative and for the statutorily favored purpose of reporting news," the motion continues. "Gawker did not 'scoop' plaintiff's right of first publication as the script was online prior to Gawker's links, and Tarantino himself set in motion the circumstances by which the script circulated. Gawker made minimal use of the script -- it reproduced no part of it but merely linked to another publication. Gawker's use was, at most, incidentally commercial and did not usurp the primary market for and purpose of the script: to make a movie," lawyers for Gawker had said in the lawsuit.
THR said that the legal camp of Tarantino had used the argument adult entertainment publisher Perfect 10 invoked to address lawsuits it received from several entities for indexing, linking to and providing thumbnail images of its nude content. THR said that an appeals court, despite rejecting any direct copyright infringement claim, allowed the possibility of an entity to pursue a contributory liability claim if the defendant was knowledgeable of infringing another's materials and significantly encourages or induces others to infringement of such material.
