Will There Be Copyright Issues With '50 Shades of Grey' Due to 'Twilight' Similarities?

By:OK! Staff

July 3 2012, Published 3:24 p.m. ET

There are a few trendy book series that hit the market every few years or so, and it just so happens that two of the most popular in recent times — Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey — bear a striking resemblance to one another.

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Both center around goopy love stories (one just a little more erotic), with the character sketches in Fifty Shades of Grey almost mirroring exactly those in Twilight. With a movie version of Grey currently in the works and the fifth Twilight flick to hit the big screen in November, will author EL James face copyright-infringement problems from Stephanie Meyer, who penned Twilight first?

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It's a good question, but the answer is "no" according to Anthony Friedman of Los Angeles firm Levene, Neale, Bender, Yoo & Brill L.L.P.

Celebuzz.com asked his thoughts, and he said the movie at this point is irrelevant. If there were copyright problems, EL James' trilogy would never have been published to begin with.

“If there was an infringement on the copyright, or anything like that, out of the Twilight books, when the Shades of Grey books came out, they would have stopped it at that point. So, as you move along and then take the book and put it down into a screenplay, by the time you’ve gotten to that point, that book is out there enough, and enough people have gotten it into the commerce and have seen it … If anybody would have had an issue, it would have already happened.”