The author of the “Dark-Hunters” series is suing the author of the “Shadowhunters” series for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and trade dress infringement.
Welp.
Of all the things I was expecting 2016 to bring, more Cassie Clare plagiarism LOLs wasn’t even on the list.
Reading about this, it looks like CC thought Kenyon would just let it die down like Pamela Dean did.
I’ve already seen at least one person arguing that Kenyon is “burning her bridges” and somehow angering the publishing industry/destroying her future career by bringing suit. And seriously? Fuck that noise.
There is already way too much pressure on women in publishing (and EVERYWHERE ELSE) to “play nice.” Look, Kenyon may well have realized that this would upset people, but it’s not like she was the one with the movie deal and the Netflix thingy and what-the-fuck-ever else. It’s perfectly possible she would rather have made her last dime ever from her series than sit down quietly for the dubious pleasure of watching her work hijacked.
If she makes Cassie Clare finally face comeuppance, Kenyon will become one of my favorite people. I’m buying her books as soon as I can afford to.
The only potential problem is that beyond the ‘dark hunter’ and ‘shadow hunter’ name similarity in this case, there’s an issue with ‘the basic concepts being similar’ opening up a particularly nasty precedent. I haven’t read both series, so are there a few more glaring similarities than that, or is it being kept to the name / trademark issue?
Considering this is Cassie Clare, I’d guess she lifted every concept directly and just changed the names, and only did the latter when forced to. This is the person who copied whole swathes of writing* directly from Pamela Dean’s work and then pretended she’d “forgotten” and tried to muddy the waters generally by simpering about how people apparently wanted bibliographies in fanfic now.
*Not concepts, btw. Multiple chunks of actual writing. No grey area there, she claimed she wrote the words someone else wrote, it was as clear as plagiarism gets.
Yeah. I suppose it wouldn’t be surprising.
I’m just concerned what that means for people inspired by earlier works and including sly nudge-nudge wink-wink references as a nod to the work that influenced them. While also actually being open about said influences, at times.
A good example is A Song of Ice and Fire and its relationship with Memory, Sorrow and Thorn.
According to the article I linked to, CC had to be told outright that she couldn’t use ‘darkhunters’, and when that was being threshed out she also agreed to not ‘expand on’ the use of ‘Shadowhunters’. I don’t think this will set the legal precedents you’re concerned about – Kenyon hasn’t said boo to any other authors of ‘demon-hunter’ books, so far as I know, and hasn’t really chased up CC until now, when “Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments” is about due to hit screens.
The comparisons might not win the case, but they make for interesting reading. By “interesting” I of course mean “I can’t stop LOLing right now.”
…Oh, lawl. I know her defenders are gonna be up in arms like “so we can’t have blond guys now?” and “so we can’t have magic councils now?”, not getting that it’s the sheer number of similarities, especially the minor ones, but… lol.
Hah, they totally are.
But this is the stuff that has had me scratching my head all day. Like, she didn’t “just” steal the concepts, the characters, even the Darkhunter symbol. No, the blue-eyed dark-haired flannel shirt-wearing demon hunter father figure is still blue-eyed, dark-haired, and wears flannel shirts. She couldn’t bother to make him a brown-eyed guy who wore polo shirts or something. And she did the same with so many characters.
I’m driving my husband nuts with this. He says severe lack of creativity is severe lack of creativity, of course it extends to everything… but I don’t get being *this* lazy about it.
It’s messed up, the sheer arrogance of it too. People adapt existing characters all the time, but she doesn’t even have enough creativity to do that; she just photocopies the character. The ‘ten percent’ copyright rule is bullshit, but she can’t even be bothered to go that far. And then her followers defend her wholesale theft again.
Oh lawdy lawd. It’s popcorn time. I’m not surprised, Cassandra Clare has always been a hack who steals from other sources. It’s about time someone called her to the carpet.
Oh wow. This takes me back about a decade.
I have popcorn and chocolate ready to go, and I am cackling like a loon.
This should be interesting. They say there’s nothing new under the sun but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try…
I’ve always been on the fence about people like Cassie Clare.
I mean, here are a bunch of us, writing fanfic. Meaning we’re doing exactly what she gets bitched at for doing, except that (before she went pro) she was doing it to other fanfic writers as opposed to just doing it to commercialized works. Yeah, since she went pro, we can see the line as being copying ideas vs. profiting off of copying ideas, but people were pretty ticked at her before the profiting part ever came in.
But…transformative works, man. She still wrote the damn books. However much she lifted from other creators, she’s the one who spent valuable time putting down hundreds of thousands of her own words. And speaking as a writer myself: even if you rip off 80% of your ideas from other sources, you’re still doing the work of recombining them, and the ideas tend to be the easy part anyway. The words themselves are the hardest part, and they were hers (I mean…unless they weren’t; I’ve heard rumors, but who knows with rumors).
I dunno, I wasn’t around for the Cassandra Clare Saga, so I imagine I’m missing all kinds of history here. But still I think about these things.
Mostly I think we really just need to redesign intellectual property law into something that more parallels “how to balance forging your stuff from the churn of pop culture with being courteous to other creators.”
