Blizzard Entertainment And Valve Settle “Dota” Trademark Lawsuit

Valve Software and Blizzard Entertainment have settled a lawsuit over the ‘Dota’ label. Under terms of the agreement the Defense of the Ancients name will be used by both company’s in different ways.

For example Valve will be able to use toe ‘Dota’ label on a commercial level for products such as the upcoming action strategy game Defense of the Ancients 2, while Blizzard Entertainment will retain the rights to use the name for maps created for WarCraft III and StarCraft II.

Because Blizzard Entertainment can only use the ‘Dota’ name for player-created content the company says Blizzard DOTA will now be renamed Blizzard All-Stars.

Defense of the Ancients originally comes to use from a WarCraft III mod that was released in 2003 and led to the creation of the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA). However in 2010 Valve announced Dota 2 which the company was developing with designer IceFrog.

After the 2010 announcement Blizzard said it was baffled that Valve had trademarked the name since Valve had never before used it for produces or games. Eventually the WarCraft III developed filed a U.S. trademark opposition to stop Valve from using the name it had originally created.

Following the filing of that lawsuit Blizzard Entertainment was joined by League of Legends developer Riot games who said the ‘Defense of the Ancients’ name belonged to the gaming community and not to a single gaming programmer.

All parties involved are not commenting on the courts decision at this time and appear to be going on their separate ways following the outcome of the trademark lawsuit.