Valve Trademarks "DOTA"; Announcement Soon?
The mysterious IceFrog joined Valve last year and was put in charge of a team. While blog posts made by the developer indicated that his project at Valve would be of specific interest to DotA fans, it was uncertain if the project would retain the name or even be the same type of game. The project could just share the name or could be a full port.
If I had to speculate (I do), I would predict a free-Steam release of DOTA that is a re-balanced, re-tooled version of the WC3 mod with full Steamworks integration. It will be interesting to see if the backend features match those of Heroes of Newerth, which added several desired features like stats tracking, VoIP, and game re-joining.
Shacknews has once again asked Valve for a statement, but has not heard back. They're probably busy playing DotA...
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DougL
replyAmazing how they're trademarking DOTA. That's like trying to trademark air. IT'S MINE NOW! YOU CAN'T BREATH IT! Too late.
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Yeah I don't get this - how would they own it unless the guy that originally made the map or name signed off on it (not IceFrog)
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what you mean Eul? He doesnt cares
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Try and trademark "WoW" and release an MMO called that.
See what happens.-
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If it's used by many different people, you can't trademark it.
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Legally, that doesn't mean shit. Unless it's an already trademarked name in the same category/genre.
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So I can trademark a commonly used term/definition used by many people? Something like "shackers" or "emo"?
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Yeah, if it's not already copyrighted.
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you can't trademark extremely common phrases, microsoft almost lost their windows trademark in the legal battle with lindows (a linux distro with a windows look and feel). DOTA is not that common though, for example you could possibly trademark shackers but you probably couldn't trademark emo.
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Preexisting means nothing. Future proofing is what they're doing.
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Disentary Orangutangs of Total Annihilation, anyone?
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