Blizzard Opposes Valve on Defense of the Ancients Trademark Filing

Defense of the Ancients used to be a WarCraft III map, created using the World Editor included with the game. There’s a little bit of the EULA of WarCraft III  that states:

All title, ownership rights, and intellectual property rights in and to the Program and any and all copies thereof (including, but not limited to, any titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialog, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, animations, sounds, musical compositions, audiovisual effects, methods of operation, moral rights, any related documentation, and `applets’ incorporated into the Program) are owned by Blizzard or its licensors.

Which I basically interpret to mean: everything created using this tool are owned by Blizzard and cannot be distributed outside of the context of a WarCraft 3 map file (.w3x file extension). Also, the things you defend in your typical DotA game are called Ancients, which are referenced throughout the WarCraft mythology.

This didn’t stop Valve from hiring IceFrog (arguably one of the most important developers of the original map) and making their own stand-alone version. They didn’t really change all too much about the game, — all of the playable heroes, items, and the structure names are still the same — and it looks fairly similar to the original, albeit in a shiny new engine.

Valve filed for a trademark for Defense of the Ancients (including the acronyms DotA, DOTA, and Dota). Blizzard had stated in the past that they didn’t think that was a great thing for them to do, and that in trademarking DotA ”…that means that you’re really taking it away from the Blizzard and Warcraft III community and that just doesn’t seem the right thing to do” (Rob Pardo, Blizzard). Which is more or less the sentiment that Blizzard are trying to get at in the opposition filing that recently surfaced.

 Valve seeks to appropriate the more than seven years of goodwill that Blizzard has developed in the mark DOTA and in its Warcraft III computer game and take for itself a name that has come to signify the product of years of time and energy expended by Blizzard and by fans of Warcraft III. Valve has no right to the registration it seeks.

There’s a great post on MMO-Champion about the whole fiasco as well.

I don’t think any of the fans of DotA are upset or confused that Valve picked up IceFrog and made a sequel (which is plainly visible by the ’2′ in the title of the new game). If anything, fans are ecstatic that the map was actually getting the attention of IceFrog in a new capacity, with a new, much more flexible platform than the original was on, and that there would be a lot more manpower (and money) behind it than the original.

I’m not entirely sure if I can predict what’s going to go down in the coming months of legal hell. The little part of the EULA of the WarCraft 3 that’s quoted above may just have Valve in the kind of bind that they don’t want to be: sitting on a game that they don’t actually own.

Blizzard also have their own Action/RTS game coming out as a StarCraft 2 custom map: called Blizzard DotA, so Blizzard clearly haven’t forgotten about the genre either. And funny fact: when you search “Warcraft 3″ on google, the Wikipedia page for Defense of the Ancients comes up before the official battle.net page for WarCraft 3, so there’s definitely a bit of jealousy from Blizzard here.

via ausGamers