Whether these dickish EULAs would hold up in all situations is uncertain, and they won't matter for most user-created content. They don't often use blunt words like "property" or "own," but in legal speak, an exclusive license is essentially the same as ownership, because the word "exclusive" excludes even you, the creator. The Rockstar Games EULA, for instance, gives Rockstar an exclusive license to anything you create with its software. Other publishers also give themselves exclusive licenses to content made within their software. It takes just weeks or months now for a mod to go from free project to ultra-valuable commodity, and if such a commodity originated as a mod for your game, it's useful to be able to claim ownership of its name, characters, and art as one weapon to pull out in a trademark or copyright dispute. It didn't take much time for the battle royale craze to follow from the Minecraft Hunger Games mod and the Arma/DayZ battle royale mods, and it took even less time for Dota Auto Chess to lead to projects from Valve, Riot, Blizzard, and Epic. Valve won, seemingly.Īfter the Dota 2 naming dispute, mods only became more influential and important. It got to use the full name, Defense of the Ancients, but agreed to change the name of Blizzard DOTA to Blizzard All-Stars, which later became Heroes of The Storm. Valve got to keep the name Dota 2 and Blizzard got-well, we're not sure. The companies settled the dispute out of court. In 2012, Blizzard went after Valve over its trademark filing for the name "Dota 2." Blizzard argued that the Warcraft 3 custom game Defense of the Ancients, also known as DotA, was associated exclusively with Warcraft and Blizzard, and that Valve had no right to trademark the acronym for a new game, especially because "Ancients" was a reference to Warcraft lore. It may also be hoping to avoid another Dota 2 situation. (Image credit: Valve) Why claim ownership?Ĭlaiming ownership of your Warcraft 3 maps does simplify things: There's no need for Blizzard to explain every possible way in which it is free to use your work, because it's simply saying that your work is its work. Valve trademarked the name 'Dota 2' in 2012, even though Defense of the Ancients was a Warcraft mod. That means that not only can it distribute your map until the end of time, it can theoretically prevent you from distributing it yourself, or from reusing any of the original work you put into it, whether that's for a mod for another game, a standalone game, or anything else. What makes Blizzard's EULA different is that it is claiming exclusive ownership of your work. You're sharing the rights to the work, in other words. The company you gave a non-exclusive license to can also do those things. You can license them to someone else, or sell them on a shirt. "Non-exclusive" is the important word here: It means that the parts of your mod that are wholly original-your original art, for example-are also yours to do with what you want. You've given Valve a non-exclusive license to everything you've uploaded by agreeing to the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Non-exclusive licensing agreements can be found all over the place, and for the most part, they exist simply so that you can't upload something to Steam Workshop and then claim Valve is infringing on your copyright by hosting it. Not only can Blizzard distribute your map until the end of time, it can theoretically prevent you from distributing it yourself.
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