The website which is the subject of a lawsuit by the director after it linked to a version of his script has hit back by claiming Tarantino was responsible for the media interest

Gawker has blamed Quentin Tarantino for generating the media frenzy that led the website to link to a leaked screenplay for the Oscar-winning film-maker's now-abandoned western The Hateful Eight. It also claimed Tarantino enjoyed fans reading his work and wanted the draft script to be published online.

Tarantino has filed a copyright lawsuit against Gawker Media for disseminating copies of the 146-page screenplay, claiming the company's Defamer blog went "too far" by linking to an anonymous host where fans could read it in full. But Gawker's John Cook has now posted a defiant response accusing the Pulp Fiction director of rank hypocrisy.

"Last week - before the publication of the script online but after it had begun circulating in Hollywood - Tarantino loudly turned The Hateful Eight leak into a topic of intense news interest by speaking about it at length to Deadline Hollywood, which had itself obtained a copy," he writes. "Tarantino's very public complaints about the leak - which named the six parties (of varying degrees of celebrity and potential culpability) that he believes had access to it - were picked up and amplified afterward by dozens of news sites, including Defamer. It was Tarantino himself who turned his script into a news story, one that garnered him a great deal of attention."

Cook cites as evidence a line in Tarantino's Deadline interview in which the film-maker said: "I do like the fact that everyone eventually posts it, gets it and reviews it on the net. Frankly, I wouldn't want it any other way. I like the fact that people like my shit, and that they go out of their way to find it and read it."

Tarantino himself has not yet responded to the blog post. But the film-maker's interviewer for the Deadline article in which he originally revealed his anger over the leak, Mike Fleming Jr, immediately hit out at Cook's comments.

"Gawker is trying to let itself off the hook by taking Tarantino completely out of context," he wrote. "What the film-maker told me was that he is not a hypocrite. When he is shooting his film and sees the final draft of the script online, he in the past has not been upset and likes that people seek it out.

"Seems to me that what Gawker is dismissing is the fact that this is Quentin Tarantino's intellectual property creation. As he said, he owns the fucking thing, and therefore, if a website conveniently plays up an anonymous web address which Gawker readers were encouraged to use so they could 'help themselves' to Tarantino's copyrighted work, Tarantino and only Tarantino can decide whether or not he is incensed. I don't cover the lawsuits here, but it feels like Gawker is on a slippery slope."

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