By Ryen Rasmus

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels and their big-screen adaptations have been dividing the public into competing camps for some time now: Twilighters (aka Fangirls, aka Twihards, aka Twitards) v. Anti-Twilighters, Team Edward v. Team Jacob,  Movie-lovers v. Book-purists. Now, however, one Twilight feud is making its way into court.

Last week, TMZ reported that Summit Entertainment – the studio that releases the Twilight films – had filed suit against a software publishing company called Topics Entertainment for allegedly ripping off Summit’s intellectual property. According to Summit, Topics’s forthcoming DVD documentary, Forks: Bitten By Twilight, features a cover design that is just a little bit too similar to that of Summit’s own DVD doc, Twilight in Forks: The Saga of a Real Town.

The visual similarity is problematic, Summit claims, since both flicks focus on the same topic: how the release of the Twilight books and movies has affected people’s day-to-day lives in the true-life city of Forks, Washington – where Meyer’s fictional vampire saga is set. Even worse, Summit’s doc, which goes on sale March 20th, is being released right on the heels of the Topics doc, which hits shelves on March 16th.

Needless to say, Summit has more than passing interest in keeping the Topics doc out of the marketplace, and a suit for trademark infringement might just do the trick. According to the Seattle Times, Summit’s complaint alleges that the Topics doc “uses the ‘Twilight’ name in a” font that is “‘confusingly similar’ [to] Summit’s stylized version” and that “other aspects” of the Topics doc cover, including “an image of a moonlit forest of trees and a quote attributed to ‘Twilight’ author Stephenie Meyer” are “‘likely to result in continued confusion amongst retailers and the general public.’” Summit’s desired form of relief? An injunction against the promotion and release of the Topics flick, of course, along with attorneys fees and other unspecified damages.

Will both DVD’s make it to the market? Only time will tell. In the meantime, check out the facts behind another Summit suit filed against an alleged trademark infringer, Edward Cullen’s unlikely effect on the heroin trade, and the story of Burkittsville, Maryland, whose residents went through an ordeal pretty similar to the one documented in Topic’s and Summit’s flicks after the release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Paige Gabert.