I took a quick look at this after a friend posted a link to the author's post yesterday. The HarperCollins novels is a six part series - one story in six parts. It seems like the books of the complaining author is standalones.
One thing I also noticed, and that seemed a bit off to me, is that the author's story doesn't completely make sense. In the
original post he links to
this interview to prove the Authonomy link. In the September 2010 interview he talks about wanting to be published, and that he's sent his manuscript out to agents. Apparently he self-published his book in October 2010. He could of course have had a change of heart for a good reason, but to me it looks like the actions of a type of person who does things on the spur of the moment. I really doubt that he has read the HC books before making his claim, because I think he would have stated that. And from cover copy alone, it's very easy to make claims of similarities in books. Large parts of Epic Fantasy could be seen as copies of eachother if you only check that.
As has already been said, time travel isn't something new. I read some choose-your-own adventure books in the 1980s were you were a time traveller in different time periods. One of them was in a pirate setting.
You'll also note that in his original post he glosses over how common the term "Time Hunters" is, and "forgets" to mention the Doctor Who spin-off series "
Time Hunter" that came out before he started working on his book(s). (According to his timeline.)
I don't see the premise of the HC books as original, but that premise stopped being original long before the turn of the century. I don't think the author has a claim to being copied unless he can prove that text has been copied directly from his books.
Someone said in one of the posts about this:
"I’m going on the assumption that Mr. Ashmore is telling the truth because after all, what would dishonesty get him?"
Well, he certainly has gotten a hell of a lot of publicity.
-Not that getting publicity necessarily was his motive for this. Taking the interview mentioned above, and the publication dates of his book as a guide, I'd say he just has gotten impatient and jumped the gun. He's making his claim without doing the necessary research.