In an interview at Eurogamer, the latter describes Dota as a game that emerged from the Warcraft III community and hence is confused by Valve's attempt to obtain the rights on the term DOTA, something that has been made available freely all along to the community. The issue arises as Blizzard announces its free Starcraft II mod called Blizzard DOTA. Videos from Blizzcon conference as well as some previews on Blizzard Dota are shown down below.
Rob Pardo, the Executive Vice President of 'Game Design' at Blizzard Entertainment, debates on Valve's trademark registration:"To us, that means that you're really taking it away from the Blizzard and Warcraft III community and that just doesn't seem the right thing to do.
[It seems] a little bit of confusion, to be honest. Certainly, DOTA came out of the Blizzard community. It just seems a really strange move to us that Valve would go off and try to exclusively trademark the term considering it's something that's been freely available to us and everyone in the Warcraft III community up to this point.
Our response is that they don't own the term DOTA at this point. It's something that they're filing for.
Our contention is that it should continue to be available to Blizzard and to our community."
Among the 12 heroes announced in Blizzard DOTA are Raynor, Kerrigan and Zeratul from StarCraft, fighting alongside Sylvanas and Muradin from Warcraft and comedy hybrid characters like Grunty (a baby Murloc in a space marine suit) plus Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftan, the mascot of Blizzard's house band.
Blizzcon 2010: Introduction to Blizzard DOTA
Data Editor as well as some previews of the game (Click the [3:40] min mark)
Links
Eurogamer - Source
SK-Gaming - Sub Source
Wikimedia - Source Picture
