Some time after, Penders then filed copyright with Bioware over Sonic Chronicles over the character designs for Shade. It's worth noting that Scott Fulop tried the same thing and failed. Speculation is Penders wife is loaded while Archie were going through significant financial trouble at the time, so Archie were basically forced to settle. The terms of this settlement have never been made public. Penders was supposed to have a work for hire contract, but due to some incompetence with Archie they lost the original contract, and eventually settled out of court. Penders however kept trying to do stuff with the characters he wrote, which came to a head filing for copyright for his stories and then filing copyright infringement against Archie. However while the comic started going entirely off the rails and started to focus less and less on the title character, eventually SEGA became aware of all this, and after some restructuring Ken Penders left (was booted off?) soon after, replaced by Ian Flynn (the current writer for the IDW Sonic comics and apparently has a role in the upcoming game). This was shortly before Sonic Adventure was made, but worth noting Adventure was made by SEGA Japan, who would have been entirely unaware of the status of the Western comics (the internet may have existed in 1998, but the world wasn't really as online back then as it is now, and not as culturally connected either). As back story, Ken Penders was originally one of the writers for the Archie Sonic comics. The comics during this time were decidedly unsupervised by SEGA, there was ultimately no need as they were making money hand over fist, so Penders ended up seeing this as an opportunity to write an Echdina tribe based off his characters from an unpublished work of his, The Lost Ones. Where Ken Penders comes into this is decidedly more. These characters were designed by Bioware under contract from SEGA, and were loosly based off the plot of Sonic Adventure and Sonic Battle (of all things, with the reintroduction of Gizoids). Heh, no that's not it. Sonic Chronicles, made by Bioware, had an Echidna tribe as a key part of its plot. Due to this lawsuit, modern Sonic side-media like the IDW comics (and maybe some mobile games) are far more highly regulated by SEGA. I think Penders won that lawsuit (I'm no legal expert, so I can't explain why exactly). He sued SEGA (or those other companies) because even tho the Sonic franchise belongs to SEGA, those characters were basically plagiarized. Not a Sonic expert, but from what I heard from some Sonic fans a long time ago - The DS game 'Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood' had characters in the story that were basically rip-offs of pre-existing characters from the Archie Comic series (specifically ones that Penders created).

Sonic the Hedgehog by Ken Penders