{"id":32324,"date":"2012-02-10T14:57:56","date_gmt":"2012-02-10T12:57:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=32324"},"modified":"2012-02-10T15:02:33","modified_gmt":"2012-02-10T13:02:33","slug":"blizzard-takes-legal-action-against-valve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/32324-blizzard-takes-legal-action-against-valve","title":{"rendered":"Blizzard takes legal action against Valve"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to documents which have surfaced on NeoGAF, it appears as though <a title=\"Company Information\" href=\"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/forum\/showthread.php\/11841-Activision-Blizzard\">Blizzard<\/a> is taking legal action against <a title=\"Company Information\" href=\"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/forum\/showthread.php\/11901-Valve\">Valve<\/a> for developing DotA 2.<\/p>\n<p>DotA was a fan-made Warcraft III mod that went on to birth an entire video game genre. When Valve announced in late 2010 that it had hired lead DotA mastermind \u201c<a title=\"Person Information\" href=\"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/forum\/showthread.php\/20179-IceFrog\">IceFrog<\/a>\u201d, and that it was developing a sequel, everyone expected\u00a0 Blizzard to make some move to protect the IP, even though the publisher didn\u2019t play any role in its development.<\/p>\n<p>The backlash never came, though, and Valve continued developing the game seemingly unhindered.<\/p>\n<p>Until now that is. It seems that Blizzard has issued a formal notice of opposition to Valve, pertaining to the use of the following names: \u201cDotA\u201d, \u201cDota\u201d, \u201cDOTA\u201d, and the full title, Defense of the Ancients.<\/p>\n<p>The ground for opposition are listed as \u201cPriority and likelihood of confusion\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The document includes Valve\u2019s formal response to the opposition, stating:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cValve admits that Blizzard is the distributor of popular video games, including the Warcraft, World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo gaming franchises. Valve is otherwise without knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the true or falsity of the remaining averments of this paragraph.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In other words, Valve denies having having knowledge that Blizzard has any ownership of the DOTA name.<\/p>\n<p>The document continues with additional details which indicate that Blizzard is continuing to attempt to stop Valve from developing DotA 2, or at least from calling it \u201cDotA 2\u201d.<\/p>\n<h5>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neogaf.com\/forum\/showthread.php?t=462639\" target=\"_blank\">NeoGAF <\/a><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Legal documents uncovered, Blizzard seeks to protect DotA name<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":32338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4],"tags":[1359,637,1610,21,1748],"class_list":["post-32324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-pc","category-xbox","tag-activision-blizzard","tag-dota","tag-dota2","tag-headline","tag-valve-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32335,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32324\/revisions\/32335"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}