Hat Tip: Hollywood Reporter
This is a little off topic as it involves a screen play script instead of photography, but the Copyright law applies the same way to both.
The judge in Taratino's contributory copyright infringement case against Gawker has granted the defense motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The judge ruled that Tarantino's filing failed to allege facts that would give rise to damages if proven true in court.
The dismissal was "without prejudice", meaning Tarantino's lawyers have an opportunity to amend the filing. The question yet to be answered is whether Tarantino's team have the information necessary to meet the requirements set by the judge in the dismissal.
The judge rules that Tarantino had to allege a copyright violation by a specific person as a result of Gawker posting the download link. This means that Tarantino needs to amend the complaint to 1) cite a specific person that downloaded a copy of the script and 2) link that download back to Gawker.
The largest hurdle facing Tarantino at this point may be accumulating the necessary information in the period of time allowed to amend the filing.
It seemed odd to me that Tarantino failed to sue the web site that uploaded the script. That decision may come back to nite him. He needed to name them as a party to the suit in order to get the information needed to sue Gawker. His failure to sue the actual infringing party may prevent him from suing Gawker for contributory infringement.
Suing the site that hosted the script would have enabled Tarantino to obtain the IP addresses of all those people that downloaded the script. He then could have obtained referral information from that site. (Web sites can track the web page that someone was on before landing on their web site.)
This would have given him a list of IP addresses that downloaded the script immediately after visiting Gawker.
Tarantino only has until May 1 to amend the complaint. That may not be enough time to obtain that information.
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