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 Tarantino had kept the script for his ensemble western The Hateful Eight unpublished, but someone obtained a copy and posted it online.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.'"

Comments

Let's all discuss

[Sean]

What the pirates over at TPB are saying. Find those comments here:

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent...

Re:Let's all discuss

[MightyMartian]

I enjoy Tarantino films as much as the next red blooded male, but really, what is a Tarantino script:

1. Introduce quirky archetypal characters.
2. Gory death scenes cast in a humorous light.
3. Lots of dialog between quirky archetypal characters.
4. Absolutely astonishing amount of blood and gore, with lots of humorous hip dialog, so you laugh as someone is shot, stabbed, torn apart, beheaded or otherwise eradicated.
5. Final dialog scenes, perhaps some gore, but inevitably leading to...
6. Over the top death and destruction on a scale that makes the mind revolt against what its seeing, with inevitably satisfying catharsis as the Tarantino-esque definition of good triumphs over the difficult to differentiate definition of evil fails.
7. Close with Morricone score or slightly obscure funky 1970s R&B song.
8. Profit!!!!!!

I only hope he doesn't sue me.

Re:Can someone please kill the fucker

[tysonedwards]

No one. The current argument is that a hyperlink to infringing work "advocates infringement".

When You Sollicit It?

[nick_davison]

Tarantino's lawyers are arguing that it wasn't available online - until Gawker offered to pay anyone who leaked a copy.

It's not illegal to report a murder. It is illegal to say, "I'll pay $10,000 for the exclusive story for the person who kills my wife."

IANAL and I've no idea whether that analogy holds true for copyright but it's apparently the angle Tarantino's lawyers are pursuing - that it's not the linking so much as the linking to an act they solicited.

Re:When You Sollicit It?

[QuasiSteve]

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.

Don't know what I find more distasteful

[Anonymous Coward]

That someone could consider hyper linking infringement or someone could consider gawker journalists.

Re:Don't know what I find more distasteful

[_xeno_]

I know. Simply because it's Gawker, I have to side with whoever the other guy is. It's Gawker, after all. Gawker is to journalism as Slashdot is to editing.

I'm an open society guy, but...

[dAzED1]

" I'm just saying that there's a journalistic reason for Gawker to do what it did"

Err...what "journalistic reason" could there possibly be for offering a ransom for an illegal activity, then publishing the results of that activity, for the sole purpose of generating adview/click revenue? Aside from gawker not even having any journalistic content, what in the world is the "journalistic reason" for that?

Now that said, I think there's a moral/ethical reason for creators to willingly do it - and somewhat for the consumers to share it even if it is against the will of the one who created it - but that's because I'm a biased open society guy, and a complete nutjob. I can't though, in all my madness, envision a world/perspective/banana in which there is a "journalistic reason" for this. Someone help me here?