Court Orders Gawker to Pull Palin Excerpts
The New York Times reports:
When Sarah Palin found out that some Web sites had posted excerpts from advance copies of her new book, she took her lament to Twitter.
“The publishing world is LEAKING out-of-context excerpts of my book w/out my permission? Isn’t that illegal?” she wrote in a post on Thursday.
Gawker, which had posted more than a dozen pages of the forthcoming book, mocked her legal analysis.
But it turns out that for the time being, Gawker has been legally prohibited from publishing the material.
On Saturday, a federal judge told the media gossip blog it must take down the excerpts until a hearing on Nov. 30, according to a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, the book’s publisher, which sued Gawker on Friday. That means Gawker’s scoop is essentially squashed until after the book, “America by Heart,” is released on Tuesday. On Saturday evening, the link to Gawker’s original post about the book no longer worked (though it still appeared in Google’s cache).
While Gawker is the only publication to face a lawsuit so far, HarperCollins has been vigilant about policing advance leaks. For example, Christopher Goff, the publisher’s general counsel, accused an anti-Palin blog, Palingates, of copyright infringement and demanded that the excerpts be removed on Wednesday.
