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Quentin Tarantino Vs. Gawker: When Is Linking Illegal For Journalists?
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Jon Healey writes in the LA Times that a new lawsuit against the Gawker Media site Defamer for linking to an infringing copy of an unreleased screenplay should send chills down the spines of every reporter who writes about copyright issues. Tarantino had kept the script for his ensemble western The Hateful Eight unpublished, but someone obtained a copy and posted it online. In its piece, Defamer quoted only a brief excerpt and a short summary published earlier that day by the Wrap. But it also included two links to the leaked screenplay on a file-sharing site called AnonFiles. In a complaint filed in federal court in Los Angeles, Tarantino's lawyers say they repeatedly asked Gawker Media to remove the links, to no avail. John Cook, Gawker's editor, responded with a post that rebuts the complaint's most damaging allegations, saying Defamer had no involvement whatsoever in the leak or the script's posting online. Cook also quotes Tarantino's comments last week to Deadline Hollywood, in which the filmmaker said he likes having his work online for people to read and review. 'Reporters often assume that providing links to items of public interest is perfectly aboveboard, even if the items themselves aren't. If this case goes to trial, it could help clarify what links simply can't be published legally, regardless of the news value,' writes Healey. 'I'm not arguing that what Gawker did was legal — that's a judge's decision. I'm just saying that there's a journalistic reason for Gawker to do what it did, and those of us who write about copyrights struggle often with the question of how to report what seems newsworthy without crossing a line that's drawn case by case.'"
The Dutch 'populist weblog' GeenStijl faced a similar suit from the Dutch edition of Playboy magazine.
They had linked to an archive that contained leaked pictures of a yet-to-be-published issue, and Playboy initially won in a lower court which sided with them on the suggestion that said linking was effectively publishing,
GeenStijl appealed, and a higher court found that since Playboy could not prove that the link was absolutely private, GeenStijl could not be seen as the the publishers.
( GeenStijl still had to pay a fine because the judge found that just mentioning it would have sufficed for the purposes of press, and posting a part of one of the images breached copyright. )
This leaves the door open for any news organization (or tabloid magazine) to upload things anonymously, then link to it, and claim innocence. On the up side, it means that you can still link to things and not get sued for it on the basis that you would be seen as the publishing party. In the U.S. there's still the DMCA to contend with, of course.