Cassandra Clare, best-selling author of the Mortal Instruments series, is being sued by popular fantasy author Sherrilyn Kenyon over copyright infringement, trademark infringement, false advertising, trade dress infringement and unfair competition. The lawsuit was filed in Kenyon's home state of Tennessee.
Kenyon is suing for damages, alleging that due to the similarities between her own New York Times best-selling Dark Hunter novel series and Clare's The Mortal Instruments series caused lost profits. Kenyon, whose first Dark Hunter novel was published in 1998, alleges in that many of the themes, characters and symbols in her series and The Mortal Instruments are nearly identical, according to court documents.
In 2006, Kenyon and Clare were involved in another lawsuit due to Clare's use of the term "dark-hunter" in her Mortal Instruments series. Kenyon owns the trademark rights to the terms "were-hunter," "dark-hunter" and "dream-hunter." Clare changed the term to "shadowhunter," however, and agreed to not expand the use of this term, including the use of it in the title, which was finalized as The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.
The Dark-hunters and the Shadowhunters symbols are so identical that the publisher accidentally printed 100,000 copies of the Shadowhunter book with the Dark-hunter emblem on the cover. Even though the books were destroyed, copies were still sold with the Dark-Hunter mark, according to Entertainment Weekly.
However, as TheCelebrityCafe.com previously reported, Freeform, previously known as ABC Family, is running a series based on Clare's novels entitled Shadowhunters.