Who wants to team up and trademark First Person Shooter?

Great interview. They came off as sincere and well-intentioned, and not at all bitter. I do agree with them; Valve doesn't really deserve to have the name DotA locked up (and I was very surprised when they moved to claim it).

If any company "deserves" to claim the name, its Blizzard.

blizzzard might actually have some copyrights on dota because anything created with their world builder is theirs, in theory by the eula.

No, they don't. Maps are referred to in the EULA as "New Materials." There is only one major section that deals with them.
____
C. You are entitled to use the Program for your own use, but you are not entitled to:
...
(iii) use or allow third parties to use the Editor and the New Materials created thereby for commercial purposes including, but not limited to, distribution of New Materials on a stand-alone basis or packaged with other software or hardware through any and all distribution channels, including, but not limited to, retail sales and on-line electronic distribution without the express written consent of Blizzard;
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IANAL, but I interpret this as meaning that you can't sell WarCraft III maps. However, neither the gameplay mechanics, nor the general map designs, nor user-created 3D models and sounds, nor ownership of the names of user-created maps are claimed by Blizzard in this EULA. They're just saying you can't sell maps you make with their software.

Did Valve trademark "DotA" or "Defense of the Ancients"? If the former is the case, I'd imagine that Valve is trying to be clever and make a title that's not "Defense of the Ancients" but can still be abbreviated as "DotA".

They have in fact tried to trademark Defence of the Ancients. The guys in the interview are being far more gracious than I would be because to me it looks like Valve stamping their authority on the brand simply because no one has trademarked it before.

Are you kidding, they had nothing to do with DotA besides putting out a game that only fanboys wanted to play and then letting the community make an actually good game out of it.
Btw, if you haven't heard it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OzWIFX8M-Y

Jesus guys, this is Valve and despite the many of you who only see the nice glossy facade Gabe puts up for you to see, you should also remember the many dirty moves Valve has pulled over the years:
- Shutting down WON to force people to use the Steam version of their games, killing off many clans, stopping many people of playing the games (my brother was one because the Steam version was a lot more demanding and Steam itself sucked resources like a vacuum cleaner)
- Pushing Counter Strike Condition Zero on us by pre-loading without permission. Pausing or cancelling the pre-load would just see it restart after a while. This all to give a bigger incentive for people to buy the game. "Hey it's already on your hard drive! Just pay and you can immediately play!" Was nice when this was installed on all three of our computers at home without a warning which made us cross our monthly bandwidth limit, costing us €5 to fix. Thanks Valve.
- Shoving a damaging update of Steam under the carpet and deleting topics on the Steam forums that brought it up. Back in 2005, a single Steam update would make Steam crash while updating. Restarting your PC then would mean you would no longer be able to enter Windows because Steam corrupted the MBR (master boot record). At first I didn't realise it was Steam but when it happened to 4 friends as well to me and my brother, and all had Nforce mobos, a bell started ringing. When I made a topic on Steam, it got deleted. When I remade it, I got a warning from a mod that reposting deleted topics was a bannable offense. I saw a lot of people on other forums with corrupted MBR's in that week - and whenever I asked, they admitted that they had Steam. In other words, Valve fucked up your hard drive and then tried to hide that.
- Making HL2 a Steam-only game even when Steam was not ready for it. The result was that it took most people half a day before the game would activate. Many people saw Steam "eat" their CD keys. I lost two Half Life keys at that time and Valve refused to give them back unless I showed a receipt. Yes, a receipt for a 6 year old game which had always worked fine with WON only because they wanted to force their buggy mess of a platform on us.
- Lying about Steam's purpose including Gave promising Steam would be better because it would feature low-priced games due to a lack of overheads or middle persons. We all know how THAT turned out.
- Steam offering subscriptions instead of licenses which basically means they can do anything they want with our accounts and we'd have zero rights. Steam is also the ONLY service that works with subscriptions - D2D, Gamersgate, Impulse, etc. use licenses.
- Empty promises (which I call lies) that when Steam is shut down, they'll make the games available. When pressed on this, it became clear that they actually meant "our own games" and NOT games from 3rd party publishers.
etc. etc.
The list is a lot longer but Valve aren't the nice friendly people so many people think. They're great at PR and obviously try to portray themselves as community-friendly but they'll go over corpses to get what they want, don't forget that.

Wow, I didn't know about the Steam vs. WON story, sounds a lot like how Blizzard destroyed BNetD. Blizzard were complete tools at the time, their official battle.net was full of so much D2 duping that no one wanted to play there; but heaven forbid anyone not play on their platform! I still can't believe they won that lawsuit.

Eh. I have no problem with companies being able to shut down rogue servers if they have fully functional servers up. From what I've seen, hacked Bnet servers are primarily used for playing pirated copies online.

Pretty sure Valve just attempted (submitted an application) to trademark 'DOTA,' that is D-O-T-A and not 'Defense of the Ancients.' At least according to the electronic application I saw -- only listed DOTA and no where did it spell out the acronym.

Why? For being in the general vicinity at the time? Good logic.