Gawker Media has agreed to pay a low-six figure settlement to actors Eric Dane and Rebecca Gayheart for posting a homemade sex tape of the couple online.
The “McSteamy” tape was published on Gawker’s Defamer blog last year and shows Dane, a star of “Grey’s Anatomy,” nude in a hot tub with wife Gayheart and friend Kari Ann Peniche.
The couple filed a $1 million copyright infringement lawsuit against Gawker in September, arguing the media Web site didn’t have permission to publish their private sex tape.
The six-figure settlement also orders Gawker to remove any traces of the sex tape from its Web sites. The video has been viewed more than 4 million times.
“Although we are confident that our use of the video on Gawker was protected fair use – because the posts already had been available to our readers for nearly a year, and because we already had won an important decision from the court striking large parts of the plaintiffs’ damages claims – we agreed to remove the posts as part of a global settlement to avoid the burden of further litigation,” Gawker chief operating officer Gaby Darbyshire said in a statement.
