Does Valve really own Dota? A jury will decide | Hacker News Reader

Does Valve really own Dota? A jury will decide

arstechnica.com

44 pointsmellinoe9 comments

>IceFrog (real name: Abdul Ismail).

Wait, what??? Is this confirmed?

Edit: court documents confirm it indeed. Cool.

For those unaware, Icefrog has always tried to keep his identity secret. There were rumors for a while that his name was Abdul Ismail, but this is the first official document listing his real name.

> Judge Breyer rejected that argument, saying that "by that logic, Star Wars: The Force Awakens would be a collective work because it arranged the most popular Star Wars heroes, settings, and one-liners into a new movie."

Entirely off-topic, but this line piqued my interest in the judge more than in the case and it seems like he's had a nice, interesting career: Watergate, Volkswagen emissions, fighting the DOJ on marijuana busts.

The way the layout kept shifting around and moving the text as I tried to read this on mobile was unbearable. I suppose it was still loading images above my scroll position. If only img tags had a feature allowing one to specify the width and height in advance.

It doesn't even explain what one of the companies is meant to be infringing.

Is it character names or lore?

I assumed characters, based on this...

>In court, mobile developer uCool tried to argue that Dota All-stars is a collective work, because it "took the most popular Dota heroes and arranged them into a new game." Judge Breyer rejected that argument, saying that "by that logic, Star Wars: The Force Awakens would be a collective work because it arranged the most popular Star Wars heroes, settings, and one-liners into a new movie."

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how this shakes down. Dota's history and eventual evolution from wc3 mod into massive commercial properties dota2 & hots is a pretty amazing journey.

I used the Warcraft 3 map editor a lot(13+ years ago) to teach myself programming. So maybe I can shed some light..

Dota 1 was originally a Warcraft 3 (a Blizzard game) custom map, built with the Warcraft 3 map editor. In Dota 2, practically every character is just a copy of a Blizzard character, because well, Dota 1 was made with Blizzard assets. They've since changed a lot of names to get around Blizzard IP. For example a character named "Windrunner" became "Windranger", "Skeleton King" became "Wraith King", etc..

One of the things I remember is when you open the application, you're first faced with a GIANT warning popup that stays open for 5-10 seconds. You have to agree to it in order to use the map editor, which includes the EULA.

They've based their entire game on Blizzard assets & have agreed to those terms over a thousand times... I think this is not going to be easy for them.

Dota was originally a StarCrat map.

But the WC3 map and later on Dota Allstars made it popular.

i dont say this a lot, but it seems this judge is biased in this case. to say the forum post was likely only intended for 'fellow modders on that forum' is not 'reasonable' at all, since generally, in all other cases, 'open source' means open source for everybody, not a limited set of people. it seems he wishes to ignore this inconvenience to benefit the established interests over the mobile developers.

where i live, the defense lawyer could argue the judge has shown he is prejudiced and the judge could be taken off the case.

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