DOTA Goes Back to Court, Jury To Decide If Its Open Source

Blizzard and Valve settled their dispute over who owns the rights to the Dota name back in 2012, but the jury's still out on whether either company has a legal exclusive right to the vaunted MOBA franchise.

uCool and Lilith Games, the mobile gaming studios behind Dota Legends and Heroes Charge respectively are being sued by Valve and Blizzard for copyright infringement. Both games make blatant use of Dota characters. Federal judge Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California published a great summary of DOTA's development in his ruling denying summary judgement. Based on the text of the ruling, its clear the judge sides with Valve/Blizzard but its a jury that will have the final say, unless of course there's a settlement out of court.

So do uCool and Lilith Games have a case? Besides the already confusing nature of Dota's development as a Warcraft 3 mod (it passed through the hands of 3 major developers: Eul, Guinsoo, and IceFrog), there's one old forum post by Eul in particular that the judge identified as a potential issue:

I wish I could give you a last map that's playable, but I can't. Instead, from this point forward DOTA is now open source. Whoever wishes to release a version of DOTA may without my consent, I just ask for a nod in the credits to your map.

[Post by Eul Sept 23 2004]

Additionally, Blizzard's EULA for Warcraft 3 clearly states that players can't use the game's mapmaker "for commercial purposes including, but not limited to, distribution of [mods] on a stand-alone basis or packaged with other software or hardware." That clause would make it difficult for Eul, Guinsoo, and IceFrog to sell their rights to the mod to Valve and Riot Games (in Guinsoo's case.)

The judge's ruling also mentions S2 Games and their Dota clone Heroes of Newerth which IceFrog worked on before moving to Valve. For Dota fans, the whole ruling is worth reading as is a more in-depth Ars Technica article on the subject.

I wonder whether similar lawsuits will start popping up concerning the Battle Royale genre and its key players. The two genres share many of the same story arcs: modders who jumped between studios, standalone games named after existing mods, and so on.

Further Reading: Judge Charles Breyer's Ruling, Ars Technica Article, Eul's 2003 Forum Post

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