The first round of Quentin Tarantinos $1 million copyright case against Gawker Media has been dismissed by a US judge. The director sued the company in January, claiming that its Defamer channel had demonstrated blatant infringement of copyright by linking to a leaked version of his script for ensemble western The Hateful Eight. But, speaking in court on Wednesday, the Californian district judge hearing the lawsuit said Tarantinos case did not show direct infringement as the script was already online. Tarantinos lawyers had accused Gawker Media of predatory journalism, and said that although the script itself was hosted on anonymous file upload site AnonFiles, they said that Gawker Media had crossed the journalistic line by promoting itself to the public as the first source to read the entire screenplay illegally. But judge John F. Walter ruled that Tarantinos case was lacking in evidence.