A California judge has been asked to block Quentin Tarantino's attempts to sue over the leaking of a screenplay for the Oscar-winning film-maker's now-abandoned western The Hateful Eight.

Gawker Media yesterday filed a motion calling for the dismissal of Tarantino's copyright infringement suit, which was lodged after the US site's Defamer blog linked to an online copy of the 146-page script in January. Tarantino had earlier said he would not move forward with The Hateful Eight, which he had been intending to shoot as a followup to 2012's Django Unchained. In his suit, the film-maker claimed Gawker "crossed the journalistic line by promoting itself to the public as the first source to read the entire screenplay illegally".

In a motion to dismiss, filed at the US district court for central California, Gawker denied it had broken any laws via its actions. The site said Tarantino had failed to argue that anyone had actually infringed on his rights by clicking on the link, and argued that Defamer was merely "reporting news".

Furthermore, suggested the motion, Gawker "did not 'scoop' plaintiff's right of first publication as the script was online prior to Gawker's links, and Tarantino himself set in motion the circumstances by which the script circulated". It added: "Gawker made minimal use of the script – it reproduced no part of it but merely linked to another publication. Gawker's use was, at most, incidentally commercial and did not usurp the primary market for and purpose of the script: to make a movie."

Gawker has cited a Deadline interview in which the Pulp Fiction director said he liked "the fact that everyone eventually posts it, gets it and reviews it on the net" as evidence that Tarantino enjoys fans reading his work and may have wanted the draft script to be published online. Copies of The Hateful Eight script emerged online in January, with its architect subsequently declaring himself "very, very depressed" about the leak. The director publicly named the agents of Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern, who had been set for roles in the movie, as possible culprits. He then shelved plans to shoot the film.