Blizzard and Valve duel for DotA

We all have played DotA during our Warcraft 3 days, but Valve attempted to trademark the name for their upcoming DotA 2 game and this hasn't sat well with Blizzard.  Although DotA was a freely developed mod, now that someone is attempting to profit from it, there may be legal issues involved. Hit the link to read the whole nasty story after the break.

Blizzard isn't taking this lying down with Rob Pardo saying:

It just seems a really strange move to us that Valve would go off and try to exclusively trademark the term considering it's something that's been freely available to us and everyone in the Warcraft III community up to this point...To us, 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

Valve then came back stating the community was cool with the idea, with Gabe Newell saying:

The issue with that was, when we were talking with IceFrog originally, he wanted to build the sequel to DOTA. So the reason to call it Dota 2 is it actually does a pretty good job of communicating to gamers what it is the game is going to be. If a gamer looks at this game and you ask them, is that Dota 2? They're going to say yeah, that makes sense. That's a good name for it. That's really what's driving that. I haven't had any customers or gamers react negatively to it. They seem to be pretty comfortable with it.

In Blizzard's opposition filing, they state that DotA has been used by the community for the Warcraft 3 mod and that Valve has never used it before.

DOTA, that for more than seven years has been used exclusively by Blizzard and its fan community, under license from Blizzard. By virtue of that use, the DOTA mark has become firmly associated in the mind of consumers with Blizzard, including to signify a highly popular scenario or variant of one of Blizzard's best-selling computer games, Warcraft III...

In contrast to Blizzard, Applicant Valve Corporation ("Valve") has never used the mark DOTA in connection with any product or service that currently is available to the public. By attempting to register the mark DOTA, 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.

Blizzard then goes on to argue that the World Editor EULA requires Blizzard's prior written consent to use for any commercial purpose, which they have granted to various 3rd parties for the promotion of the DotA mod. Valve's response is a denial or lack of sufficient information claim of anything that mentions Blizzard's widespread and long standing use of the mark. 

This argument will go on and most likely go to trial later this year. 

Comments

[Jacob Reynolds]

Blizzard makes me sick. They also have the argument that DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) is a reference to the lore of their game, so that will also help them in their case. As far as I know Blizzard didn't approach icefrog looking to make a sequel, valve did. The game is by all means his, not Blizzard's in any way. He took over development from whoever it was before him (Guinsoo?) and he went to valve to go make the sequel, so blizzard should just back off.