Two Companies are Suing Valve over the DOTA franchise

Lilith and uCool mobile studios intend to sue Valve for the right to use the DOTA name.

Both companies allegedly infringe the copyrights of DOTA owners. UCool is developing Heroes Charge (there are a lot of visual images in the game that resemble DOTA heroes), and Lilith is working on Dota Legends.

The license agreement of the original mod prohibited the use of DOTA for commercial purposes (including for individual projects based on it). This provision was ignored when the DOTA brand was sold to Valve. The Court took this fact into account.

In addition, in 2004, one of the creators of DOTA in a forum post declared the source code of the project open and allowed the authors to use DOTA resources without his consent.

Federal judge of Northern California Charles Breyer refused to issue a summary judgment. This means that the companies’ dispute over the rights to the DOTA name will be decided by a jury.

DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) — originally a mod for Warcraft III from Blizzard, which created the MOBA genre. In 2012, Valve agreed with Blizzard to use the DOTA name in their projects, while Blizzard retained the rights to mods for Warcraft and Starcraft.

Source: Games Industries