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Blizzard’s Pardo Claims Valve Shouldn’t Trademark DotA

By Lawrence Sonntag | 25 October 2010 | 5 Comments   

dota2

Blizzard Executive Vice President of Game Design Rob Pardo stated that Valve shouldn’t have trademarked the title Defense of the Ancients, and has no real claim to it.

“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,” Pardo said.

Valve’s trademark came with the announcement of Defense of the Ancients 2, a full title developed by the creator of the original Warcraft III mod, Abdul “Icefrog” Ismail.

“Certainly, DOTA came out of the Blizzard community… 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,” Pardo said. ”Valve is usually so pro mod community. It’s such a community company that it just seems like a really strange move to us… I really don’t understand why, to be honest.”

Blizzard is already releasing DotA maps for Starcraft II, which may lead to a conflict between the two companies. Should that happen, Pardo already has a response prepared for Valve.

“Our response is that they don’t own the term DotA at this point. It’s something that they’re filing for,” Pardo said.”Our contention is that it should continue to be available to Blizzard and to our community.”

At that point, politics would certainly be on Blizzard’s side. The people saying they want to give things away for free always tend to win discussions, and Valve doesn’t want to be seen as anti-community.

[via Eurogamer]

5 Comments

  1. Posted by Nowitzki on 25 October 10 at 9:28pm

    Blizzard is just jealous. Move along, nothing interesting here…

  2. Posted by Satinangora on 25 October 10 at 9:44pm

    Lol, Blizzard is just mad that they didn’t do it first.

  3. Posted by Jarrad on 25 October 10 at 10:31pm

    Valve didn’t trademark Defense of the Ancients or DotA, they trademarked “DotA 2″ and “DotA 3″

  4. Posted by Mjllonir on 27 October 10 at 5:43am

    Blizz, you do not own the rights to an idea…you own what you have created, and not what others created. You gave us a tool to create, now move aside.
    Icefrog signed a contract with Valve for them to make a DotA 2. Honestly, I see no inconvenience with that. HOWEVER, the fact tha Blizzard IS making a DotA, now THAT is what I call plagiarism to it’s fullest extent.

  5. Posted by Lord Xela on 10 November 11 at 10:47am

    Low reading comprehension scores? Maybe I’m seeing this wrong…

    Back in the days of Warcraft III, a mod came out, called “Defense of the Ancients”. This fan-made idea was allowed to thrive and grow into what it is today, almost a whole new style of gameplay, comparable to FPS and RTS. It’s DotA.

    Blizzard likes its fans, and was releasing their own material, called “Blizzard DotA”.

    Valve came along, and said they wanted to get legal ownership of a term that Blizzard fans and the Blizzard community owns.

    Blizzard is not saying that Blizzard owns “DotA”, Blizzard is saying that Valve has no right to claim something that us, the gamers, made.

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