Quentin Tarantino initially filed his lawsuit against Gawker Media over the leak of his Hateful Eight script back in January, which was then dismissed in mid-April, with the judge leaving open the option to refile with additional evidence. Which Q-Ball’s lawyer’s did less than a week ago. Which makes it somewhat strange that he’s abruptly reversed course and withdrawn the lawsuit.
Now, a week later and before Gawker made any response, Tarantino has withdrawn the lawsuit without prejudice, meaning he can re-file at a later time if he chooses.
And in fact, Tarantino’s dismissal motion hints but hardly guarantees a sequel. It says, “This dismissal is made without prejudice, whereby Plaintiff may later advance an action and refile a complaint after further investigations to ascertain and plead the identities of additional infringers resulting from Gawker Media’s contributory copyright infringement, by its promotion, aiding and abetting and materially contributing to the dissemination to third-parties of unauthorized copies of Plaintiff’s copyrighted work.” [HollywoodReporter]
Well, Tarantino says the motion was filed without prejudice, but Spike Lee thinks he used the N-word way more times than was artistically necessary.
As our own legal counsel has been over, the initial lawsuit claimed “contributory infringement.” The judge threw that out, saying that there needed to be evidence of direct infringement to support a claim that Gawker had contributed to it. The refiling of the suit then claimed Gawker had committed direct infringement by downloading the leaked script to their computers, and more contributory infringement when they asked readers to provide the script, then posted links to it. But now we won’t have to argue the tedious ins and outs of script leakage at all unless Quentin decides to refile.
Still no hints as to what caused the change of heart, but I’d like to think the Coke Wizard appeared to him late one night to promise him that if he dropped the lawsuit, they could hang out every day and be best friends and he could learn to teleport. “You don’t want to spend all day in that silly courtroom, do you?? Abracadabra! Now drink this cognac out of a woman’s shoe!” (*tips over rainstick, jumps through kitchen window*)