This week, Quentin Tarantino and Gawker got along about as well as Mr. Pink and Marvin Nash (20+ year-old spoiler: they don't get along). It all started when a new Tarantino script (called The Hateful Eight) leaked online, prompting him to cancel the movie. Gawker went ahead and published links to the document in light of the news, resulting in a swift lawsuit (Scribd) from Tarantino for copyright infringement and contributory copyright infringement.
"Gawker Media has made a business of predatory journalism, violating people’s rights to make a buck," the complaint stated. "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."
With so many links leading to The Hateful Eight, Tarantino's team sent DMCA notices to Google for targets including the original Gawker piece. This weekend, TorrentFreak reported that 29 URLs were highlighted in total—but Google has only acted on a few. Currently, the Google Transparency Reports shows just two removed URLs. The takedown requests run the gamut, from links at Gawker, Twitter, and Yahoo to others at limetorrents.com and thepiratebay.se. As of this writing, the removed URLs were from kickass.to and torcache.net.
TorrentFreak reached out to Google without a response, but the site postures that the lack of action is its own statement from Google. After all, Google Search links to plenty of potentially infringing URLs, so Gawker being reprimanded for some form of that activity could be worrisome. As of today, TorrentFreak noticed while some of Gawker's original Hateful Eight links are now dead, Google searches can still lead to articles with excerpts and screen shots from the script.
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