The NY Times War On All Wordle ‘Clones’ Continues

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 againstunofficial KoreanandBosnian-languageversions of the game. Additional requests were filed this week againstWirdle- a variant created by dialect group I Hear Dee in 2022 to promote the Shaetlan language - andReactle, an open-sourceWordleclone built using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind. It was developed prior to theTimes'purchase of the game, according to its developer, Chase Wackerfuss.

TheReactlecode has been copied around 1,900 times,according to GitHub, allowing developers to build upon it to create a wide variety ofWordle-inspired games that use different languages, themes, and visual styles, some of which404 Mediasays are substantially different" fromWordle. The DMCA notice againstReactlealso targets all of these games forked from the originalReactlecode on GitHub, alleging that spinoffs containing theWordlename have been made in bad faith" and that gameplay is copied exactly" in theReactlerepository. Numerous developers commenting on aHacker News threadalso 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,Wordlehas itselfbeen criticized over striking similaritiesit shares withLingo, 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.