A federal court will be deciding whether AAA video game giant Valve Software owns the popular multiplayer online battle arena (or MOBA, for short) title, Dota 2. Mobile developers Lilith Games and uCool attempted to create Dota 2 clones for mobile devices (Dota Legends and Heroes Charge, respectively), but were sued by Valve and Blizzard Entertainment for copyright infringement. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, “Intellectual Property (IP) refers to the creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.” When faced with the copyright claim, uCool argued that Valve’s claim was “illegitimate” due to it not owning the source material in the first place.
Longtime forum poster and Dota 2 player Ryan Eshman had always wondered about this topic, since he started playing years ago. “If you simply search “Dota 2”, most results will tell you that it was created by Valve Corporation,” he explained. “After the actual creator [Kyle “Eul” Summers, see below] put it out there for open source, members of the community took it upon themselves to create newer, cleaner versions of the work he started. I honestly believe that it belongs to the community just as much as it does to Valve, maybe even moreso.”
One member of the community, Stephen “Guinsoo” Feak, took over original creator Kyle “Eul” Summers’ legacy, and accepted contributions from the modding community. In 2005, Abdul “IceFrog” Ismail, led development of the mod (named Dota All-Stars at the time) transferred to him. He was hired by Valve in 2009, and sold the rights to Dota 2 to Valve the following year. During this time, Guinsoo was hired by Riot Games, which was working on its own MOBA called League of Legends. Riot had purchased Guinsoo’s claim to the Dota copyright, and then sold it to Blizzard. Blizzard and Valve decided to settle their clash over the Dota name outside of court in 2012. As explained in an article on Ars Technica, “Valve would retain the rights to the name for standalone games like Dota 2, while Blizzard could use it to refer to Warcraft and Starcraft mods specifically (a project then called “Blizzard Dota” would eventually become Heroes of the Storm).”
Federal Judge Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California explained how Dota began as a Warcraft III mod created by Kyle “Eul” Summers (Warcraft III being an entirely separate game owned by Blizzard Entertainment) in 2002. As the sole creator of the mod, Eul holds the rights to the “setting, heroes, rules, and name.” uCool added to this by citing a forum post from 2004 that was posted by Eul, announcing that “DOTA is now open source”. Judge Breyer questioned whether a jury would pursue this as “abandonment”, given how vague Eul was in his statement and the details of the matter.
Timeline briefly displaying the different large names who worked on Dota from its inception to Valve’s ownership of the title.
Breyer also questioned whether Blizzard’s own End User License Agreement prevented Eul from ever owning any rights in the first place, due to the distribution of mods for commercial purposes being restricted by the company. At this point forward, the case will go before a jury to decide who exactly owns the rights to Dota, as well as whether Lilith Games and uCool are in violation of those rights with their mobile game clones.
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