Is it character names or lore?
>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.
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.
But the WC3 map and later on Dota Allstars made it popular.
Wait, what??? Is this confirmed?
Edit: court documents confirm it indeed. Cool.
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.
where i live, the defense lawyer could argue the judge has shown he is prejudiced and the judge could be taken off the case.
