Federal Judge Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California lays out an excellent summary of Dota's development history in a recent ruling denying summary judgement for Heroes Charge developer uCool. Breyer explains how Dota started life in 2002 as a Warcraft III mod made by Eul (real name: Kyle Sommer), who created the mod on his own and thus holds the rights to the "setting, heroes, rules, and name."
From there, in 2003, modders started to take "the best, most enjoyable characters from all the other version of Dota" and split off a new version of the mod called Dota All-Stars. A modder going by Guinsoo (real name Stephen Feak) soon took over this branch of the project, accepting and coalescing contributions from the modding community (unlike Eul, who largely worked alone).
By 2005, lead development of Dota All-Stars had transferred to IceFrog (real name: Abdul Ismail). After a brief stint with S2 Games to work on the Dota-like Heroes of Newerth, IceFrog was hired by Valve in 2009. In 2010, he sold Valve his rights to Dota 2 "for a handsome price," as the ruling puts it. Valve later also hired Eul and acquired his rights to the game as well.
Guinsoo, meanwhile, was hired by Riot, which was working on the Dota-like League of Legends. Riot bought Guinsoo's claim to the Dota copyright and sold it in turn to Blizzard. To avoid any clashes over the Dota name, Blizzard and Valve settled out of court in 2012. Valve would retain the rights to the name for standalone games like Dota 2, while Blizzard could use it to refer to Warcraft and Starcraft mods specifically (a project then called "Blizzard Dota" would eventually become Heroes of the Storm).
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