The NY Times War On All Wordle ‘Clones’ Continues
from the the-clone-wars dept
Remember Wordle? I sure do and one of the ways I start my days at work is to pull up the site and give it a quick play. But I honestly may just need to stop, given the behavior of the current owners of the game.
For this discussion, you really do need to recall that Wordle began as a free to play, simple daily game that became a quick craze nationally. It was created by one person, Josh Wardle, who made absolutely clear at the time that he had no interest in wrapping anything like intellectual property around the game. And when others did create spinoffs or clones of the game, he handled it in roughly as congenial a manner possible.
But then he sold the game to the New York Times. And the Times promptly began to strongarm these spinoffs and clones into shutting down, wielding IP threats to do so. That was 2 years ago and the craze around Wordle has certainly died down. Has the New York Times’ bullying declined as well?
Absolutely not! The New York Times recently DMCAd several of these sorts of Wordle clones over recent days (which was first reported on by 404 Media).
Two takedown requests were issued in January against unofficial Korean and Bosnian-language versions of the game. Additional requests were filed this week against Wirdle — a variant created by dialect group I Hear Dee in 2022 to promote the Shaetlan language — and Reactle, an open-source Wordle clone built using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind. It was developed prior to the Times’ purchase of the game, according to its developer, Chase Wackerfuss.
The Reactle code has been copied around 1,900 times, according to GitHub, allowing developers to build upon it to create a wide variety of Wordle-inspired games that use different languages, themes, and visual styles, some of which 404 Media says are “substantially different” from Wordle. The DMCA notice against Reactle also targets all of these games forked from the original Reactle code on GitHub, alleging that spinoffs containing the Wordle name have been made in “bad faith” and that “gameplay is copied exactly” in the Reactle repository. Numerous developers commenting on a Hacker News thread also claim to have been targeted with DMCA takedowns.
This is silly. The Times has an advantage over all of these other clones, because it has the first version of the game. When people go to play Wordle, the vast majority of them are going to find themselves on the NYT website. A bunch of hobbyists accessing a clone a thousand times just isn’t going to represent some enormous threat to the Times.
And, hell, Wordle itself is very similar to a game created in the 50’s that was played on paper, as well as a game show called Lingo. And, ultimately, the game is also essentially a vocabulary version of the board game Mastermind.
Meaning what, exactly? Well, meaning that it’s quite rich for the New York Times to go around shutting down similar or derivative games simply because it bought, but did not create, the Wordle IP that its creator never wanted to see wielded in this way. And, in large part, over “gameplay mechanics” that the game essentially lifted from a game show from several decades ago.
Amusingly, Wordle has itself been criticized over striking similarities it shares with Lingo, a 1980s game show that centered on players guessing five-letter words, with a grid that changes color based on accuracy.
Unfortunately these are all small entities that the NYT is bullying here and most if not all of them have declined to fight back so far. Here’s hoping there’s at least one of them out there that wants to step up and push back on these DMCA notices.
Filed Under: copyright, game mechanics, wordle
Companies: ny times
Comments on “The NY Times War On All Wordle ‘Clones’ Continues”
a phrase that frequenters of the Tetris community are all too familiar with because of illegal DMCA bullying from The Tetris Company: game mechanics are not protectable
Re:
But the bullying appears to work. Wikipedia claims they get unapproved “clones” taken down regularly.
Re: Re:
It works for them, but it’s illegal. They don’t go after big self-hosted games because they’d have to go straight to a lawsuit, and that’s a lawsuit that TTC could easily lose because their brand is defined as game mechanics.
Re: Re: Re:
But they won it:
That’s like saying you’re free to make your own chess game, but you’d better not use an eight-by-eight board, alternating-color squares, or horse-shaped pieces and L-shaped movements. In other words: one can copyright game mechanics. Till that ruling’s overtuned, anyway.
Re: Re: Re:2
The ruling was objectively incorrect. The game’s developers didn’t even care, and the judge bought into TTC’s lies.
Re: Re: Re:3
I should also mention that Alexey Pajitnov himself (the creator of Tetris) plainly stated that game mechanics are not protectable.
It’s akin to Wizards of the Coast suing all game manufacturers if they include polyhedral dice.
The American Bar Association has an article on this: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2014-15/march-april/its_how_you_play_game_why_videogame_rules_are_not_expression_protected_copyright_law/
One of the examples provided is a Simpsons-themed chess set. The depictions of the characters are copyrightable, but the game rules of chess aren’t, even if chess were invented today.
Likewise, the 20×10 board, the display of randomized junk blocks at the start of the game, and the display of the next piece to fall are all game rules.
The conclusion of the American Bar Association’s own article tears into the court misruling because the court got so many of the fundamental ideas completely wrong.
Re: Re: Re:4
So did The Tetris Company in that lawsuit, who then proceded to claim none of the shit at issue was a “mechanic”. Even though, for example, the “next piece” display clearly influences the moves made by players; and the “randomized junk” is literally presented as a game mode.
Things such as character sheets, experience points, and “levelling up” would be better examples. The dice per se don’t matter to the game mechanics. Two coins in specific order could replace a D4, for instance (heads = 0, dime tails = 1, quarter tails = 2; add them, then add 1); or a deck of 20 cards, with good shuffling, could replace a D20. These days, a random-number-generating phone app could be used (and even in 1976, a dedicated device could’ve been produced for $10 in bulk, being basically a digital watch).
Well of course.
Rich makes right.
Gameplay also is not copyrightable. But this isn’t about the law. It’s about the fact that what is legal or illegal in cases like this is decided by money.
IP the reason we can’t have nice things.
Re:
Obey your Rulers, lowly serf — Congress knows best
Re:
Remember when artists and content creators used to threaten us that IP was the only reason we had nice things at all? Now we get shit like Ed Sheeran not being able to produce his own music because relatives of a corpse think that IP gives them the right to shut him down.
Truly, what goes around comes around. IP was a deal that artists made with the devil, and the devil has come to collect.
Re: Re:
Artists weren’t the ones who said that, the producers/labels/studio execs did. They just claimed to speak on behalf of “Artists”.
Re: Re: Re:
No, not “just”; it seems they’ve managed to convince at least some of the artists of that. There’s always some figurehead who is (or was) legitimately an artist, repeating those talking points. Remember when Metallica sued the world?
It’s also seen among programmers, where even some people promoting Free Software will write stuff like “well, of course it should be up to the Original Creator ™ to decide what people should be able to do with ‘their’ stuff”.
Hell, Techdirt authors still call people “pirates” for copying media.
Re: Re: Re:
Well, except for the ones who said scripted “hey guys we’re this band and we get sad if you download our stuff from Limewire” PR copy to the camera. Not to mention Metallica and the various artists who over the years have whined about the Internet being a thing.
Trying to argue “not all artists” spoke in favor of IP is a little like saying “not all men say bad things about women”. You might technically be right but nobody will think you have a good or valid take.
Re: Re: Re:2
>Not to mention Metallica
I don’t consider Lars an artist. He lost that title when he showed he was just in it for the money.
Re: Re: Re:3
This is getting into “no true Scotsman” territory. Of course no artists support “intellectual property” if every person who supports it is defined, by you, as “not really an artist (anymore)”.
Metallica is not just Lars, and did create music people liked before they got greedy. There are likely hundreds of other examples of “artists” supporting restrictive copyrights, and not just musicians; for example, the various novelists who’ve led the Authors Guild.
And of course everyone who repeats language like “piracy” and “(authors’) rights” is implicitly promoting the views of these organizations. A lot of people creating copyrighted stuff have bought into them.
Re:
No, abuse of IP is why we can’t have nice things. Nice of you to read about a case where a nailgun was used to murder someone, and then cite it as a reason we shouldn’t be allowed to use nailguns in housebuilding, though.
Re: Re:
If it’s abuse, then surely there should be some measures put in place to prevent said abuse, no? Yet any time changes are proposed to limit the possibility of said abuse, the pro-IP stans won’t have any of it. Suggest that terms be reduced from life + 70 to life + 50 and they collectively piss their pants. Recommend that statutory damages be reduced to what usually gets sentenced at several hundred or thousand per infringement and they look at you like you just ate a baby.
If Team IP won’t rein in abuse of their tool, it’s only fair that that tool gets regulated to prevent further instances of Liebowitz levels of abuse.
First things first – does this sound like the actions of a company confident in its business? Or the actions of a small-time bully?
Next, I’ve downloaded the current copy of wirdle, so that if by some strange chance the NYTimes gets its IPR tantrum satisfied by taking down all those other variants, I can put it up again in some site hopefully well out of the reach of US Intellectual Property laws and coercion, and hope somebody else will pick it up and run with it.
Re: So why don't you do it? Yourself
There are plenty of places out of reach of the U.S.A.
So. please stop with the performative posts and just set up a site yourself…
Re: Re:
Without copyright treaties with the US? Nice try, but no argument.
Mastermind
There was also a word version called Mastermind Secret Search from 1997 though it didn’t use the right place/wrong place indicators common to the original and Wordle.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/19804/mastermind-secret-search
Wonderful to heard the NYT is sending likely-fraudulent DMCA claims (and ‘/s’ on that “wonderful”).
Too bad courts have thus far completely lacked the balls to do anything about this sort of stuff when challenged.
Copyright is theft.
Re:
It is effectively keeping something away from the public that they would otherwise have every right to use (and their use of it doesn’t take away from others ability to do so), so yeah ironically modern copyright is much more like theft than copyright-infringement ever could be.
Re: Re:
…and, in some cases, from those who originally created it, as the corporations buy and sell “their” copyrights.
Too bad the creators and/or relatives of the [dead] creators of Lingo aren’t going after the NYTimes for infringement. I’m fairly sure that I read somewhere that Wardle stated he didn’t create the concept and most of the play was based on other/older games (so really it’s “on a computer” and “on the Internet” making it different… but not all that different).
The creator shouldn’t have sold out. This happens every time some major corporation obtains a small IP.
Re:
Why? They couldn’t have predicted that the buyer would start going after people for non-copyrightable game mechanics. What was really up for sale, apart from a name?
Re: Re:
^ That.
The creator was not monetizing it and his entire plan was to sell the brand. Indeed, since the creator explicitly stated the mechanics of his game weren’t copyrightable, nothing existed to stop NYT from putting out its own wordle and the creator get nothing.
Oh brother where art thou
The love of money is the worst vice. Whosoever is fain to sacrifice magnanimity for cash is worthy of the ultimate punishment.
Thank you so much for acknowledging that this is very, very similar to an older word game and the game show Lingo!