america's sweetheart

Sarah Palin’s Publisher Is Suing Gawker

Sarah Palin got all pissed off last week when excerpts from her upcoming memoir, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag, were leaked by Gawker.com. The nuggets included her surprisingly laudatory thoughts on Juno:


A European movie might have had Juno get her abortion in the opening scene and then spend the next hour and fifteen minutes smoking cigarettes and pondering the meaning of life. It would have been depressing and boring.”

In any case, last week, Palin tweeted: “The publishing world is LEAKING out-of-context excerpts of my book w/out my permission? Isn’t that illegal?” In a post responding to the tweet, Gawker’s Maureen O’Connor suggested Palin read the Wikipedia page for fair use. Now Palin’s publisher HarperCollins is suing Gawker, saying it believes “the reprinting of pages from Governor Palin’s book without permission constitutes a blatant infringement of copyright.”

So, Gawker gets to publicly defend and promote itself, claiming fair use and continuing to play a role in a dialogue about online media, for better or worse. Meanwhile, Palin got that hilarious Juno quotation leaked, which will surely only help this thing sell. Perhaps everyone will come up roses here after all.

Palin’s publisher sues Gawker over book excerpts [AP via Runnin’ Scared/VV]

Sarah Palin’s Publisher Is Suing Gawker