In the end, I think this become "much-ado-about-nothing". While I appriecate LoL's sentiments, it's not going to fly in court; they would have to prove that "DotA" is the common parlance for that kind of video game - and while it probably is, may not be enough at the moment for the courts to decide against them - or that the trademarking of "DotA" will damage the "LoL" brand - again unlikely, as they have been running concurrently with DotA as a community game for some time now.
Three thoughts:
1) Interesting enough, Valve has chosen to trademark "DOTA", not "Defence of the Ancients". This is important, as the trademark is specific to the title; by calling the game "DOTA" they can't enforce a trademark against "Defence of the Ancients", as that's not the name they actually trademarked. Oh, they can tell those above-mentioned designers that they can't call it "DOTA", but ok, sure, we'll call it by it's full name instead, and users will just call it DotA anyway, probably saying its "DotA - All Stars", or "DotA for WC3", or whatever.
2) Valve, by trademarking "DOTA", could indeed tell others that they cannot use that name for thier games/mods. As I said above, they might ask the current "designers" of DotA for WC3 to change the name to something else, which the designers might or might not do. However, I doubt that company would waste gads of money/time on the process for two reasons... A) They are fairly respectful to the mod community; after all, many of thier successful games came from mods of thier own games. They understand that community and understand that to come down on the community would cause a large amount of bad blood with the same consumers they are trying to woo. and B) The original DotA was frought with multiple designers, variations, mods-on-mods, etc. There are a large enough group of people who have "DotA" maps for WC3 that, while they could target the largest groups, such as the "All-Stars" map producers, it would likely be costly of them to try to target every person who's made a version.
3) Valve may be setting themselves up to fail (trademark-wise) in the long term. Yes, the name is bringing in alot of emotional connection (and lets face it, that's what they want), but it's also very much a name of the style of game. The suit will likely say that at the moment, it's a clear-enough distinction, but that would not necessarily stay that way. To maintain a trademark, you have to defend it from becoming the generic term for that item: Xerox has spent literally billions to protect it's name from becoming the standard name of a copier, and Google is now having to spend big bucks to make it so "Googling" something only refers to searching on Google, not using a search engine in general. If Valve can't protect the "DOTA" in the long term, the trademark may be declared invalid and undefendable. Which places them in an interesting situation, doesn't it? Either work to make the name "dota" not generic and fight any game that offically calls itself a "Dota" style game, or potentally have problems down the road defending it's trademark. Of course, this is big maybe, but it's food for thought.
Wow, I just realized how lengthy this post became. This kind of stuff facinates me as a graphic designer, so I tend to get carried away!
