After his initial lawsuit over the leak of his script ‘The Hateful Eight’ was kicked out by a judge due to a lack of evidence, just last week Tarantino filed an amended complaint.

But now, and without even waiting for Gawker to respond to his revised allegations, Tarantino has withdrawn the lawsuit attacking Gawker’s conduct as it reported the leak, or as the writer/director previously claimed, actually encouraged its distribution.

“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,” the dismissal motion reads.

The details were covered in our earlier article, but this means that Tarantino may later decide to refile his complaint if he can come up with a way to identify third parties that infringed his copyrights after being encouraged to do so by Gawker. No easy feat.

It’s also possible this is a convenient way to back out of a battle that’s looked less solid after each step. Tarantino loves making films, and it’s doubtful he likes legal battles to the same degree. After spending a considerable sum on lawyers already, swapping one for the other may have been too great a temptation.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Then, on Monday after Gawker published links to copies of the 146-page screenplay, things took a turn for the worse. The filmmaker was outraged by Gawker’s move and filed a lawsuit claiming that the blog was facilitating copyright infringement.

“Their headline boasts ‘Here Is the Leaked Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight Script’ – ‘Here,’ not someplace else, but ‘Here’ on the Gawker website,” the complaint states.

“The article then contains multiple direct links for downloading the entire screenplay through a conveniently anonymous URL by simply clicking button links on the Gawker page, and brazenly encourages Gawker visitors to read the Screenplay illegally with the invitation to ‘Enjoy!’ it.”

In addition to filing a lawsuit, Tarantino also took steps to remove links to numerous copies and references to the leaked script from Google.

Several DMCA notices were sent to Google on behalf of the director, targeting the Gawker article as well as several other forum posts and news articles. Tarantino claims that the URLs in question are infringing on his copyrights, but Google sees things differently.

Of the 29 URLs Tarantino wants to have removed, Google took action for only a handful. The links that were disabled include copies of the leaked script on torrent sites and the file-hosting site Anonfiles.

The news articles, blog posts and forum threads, however, remained online.

The Gawker article Tarantino sued over, for example, is still listed in the search results. Google’s Transparency Report also points out that “no action” was taken to remove the URL in question.

TF asked Google to explain why the Gawker page hasn’t been removed, but we have yet to hear back from them. It is worth pointing out that the copies of the screenplay that are linked from article have since been removed from Scribd and Anonfiles, so the article isn’t “infringing” anymore.

That said, Google also refused to remove links to other articles, which still have excerpts and screenshots of the leaked Hateful Eight script.

It is safe to say that the search engine is clearly taking a stand here, perhaps in part to protect their own interests. If the case against Gawker goes ahead, it is likely that Google will get involved to prevent a damaging precedent.

After all, the search engine is linking to millions of infringing files itself. Unlike Gawker, Google’s links are added to the search engine automatically, but a ruling on the issue is likely to have a broader effect.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.