NYT shutting down the Wordle archive
gamerant.com
gamerant.com
Reading closer, the “Wordle Archive” was a Wordle clone site that allowed people to play old Wordles.
No surprise that they’d be asking clone sites, especially those using both the trademark and exact content, to shut down. You can’t expect to clone Wordle, call it Wordle, use the Wordle words, and expect the Wordle owners to look the other way. This seems like a non-story.
It'd be like claiming to own tic tac toe or rock paper scissors. It's just too simple imo.
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4805%3A...
The game concept (probably) isn't copyrightable, but the code certainly is.
Of course Wordle is just Lingo but online. And Lingo is just televised Mastermind with letters instead of colours. Mastermind is an extension of Bulls and Cows and if you go back further I'm sure you can find another game like it.
There are some very big broadcasting companies that have put a lot of money into the "guess the word" genre and the New York Times probably know that they can't take down every game with similar rules.
The best they can do is find infringement of their trademark and pursue those who infringe upon it, or risk losing the trademark all together. They could also license the trademark, of course, but a blanket cease and desist letter is cheaper than negotiating a contract.
I might be wrong as I'm not a lawyer, but I was under the impression that game rules are not protected by copyright.
WB games did patent a game rules system (Nemesis), but copyright is not the same as patents, and also I'm not sure how they got away with doing it.
I'm asking about the name because you can't patent gameplay afaik, so even if it was a straight clone, as long as the word list (and code?) was original it would be OK.
On the other hand I recall Worlds.com suing (somewhat successfully?) both Second Life and Minecraft, so maybe you can patent game concepts?
But full credit to Wordle's creator, the one word a day and social media sharing stuff is the real secret sauce.
But it doesn't matter, you can't protect a game concept with intellectual property. Neither patents nor copyright allow this. The only thing that could be protected here is the name Wordle, the art assets (if there are any that are nongeneric enough), and the exact source code.
See Tetris, etc.
Secondly, everyone keeps mentioning (repeating?...) about this famous TV show in the UK; I have never heard of it until december. Reading the gameplay of the show on Wikipedia.... it sounds like an almost entirely different game, aside from the fact it (sometimes!) involves a 5 letter word, and you have to pick letters. Mastermind (the game), is so much closer
Did you actually see the tv show?
A publication whose only editorial goal is to give you novel information would not report "orphan crushing machine crushes 80 orphans, as it has every day since it was activated" since you probably already know about that. OTOH people are hitting adulthood every day never having heard of the orphan crushing machine, and you want to give them a chance to say "excuse me the what??"
"System working as intended" isn't new information, but making people consider the effects of that intention can be valuable. We might in fact want it to work a different way if we think about it for a bit.
NYT bought "Wordle" from an indie dev for $1M+. The article complains about the fact they're protecting their newly-bought and very expensive IP. The orphan-crushing analogy is a strawman, because Josh Wardle wouldn't have been incentivized to protect the IP. The incentive to protect "Wordle" happened when $1M+ was exchanged and has nothing to do with NYT as a company. Any company or person would do the same.
Definitely not a given, NYT made a choice to act aggressively to monetize their IP and can bear the consequences of doing so.
A classic example is Metallica suing their own fans who downloaded their music, and Radiohead who let fans name their own price for an album including $0. In all 3 cases above, all parties got to choose their own actions which all have their own outcomes.
You don’t think Radiohead has ever taken legal action to protect their IP? Radiohead sued Lana Del Ray because one of her songs sounded like Creep.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with protecting your personal brand.
And it’s even less aggressive with NYT because they can only cease the use of their “Wordle” trademark
It was a ripoff of the IP before the sale, and it was a ripoff of the IP after the sale, and the owner (whoever it is at whatever point) can send a cease and desist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174269
This is the kind of dark-pattern/anti-consumer stuff you should expect if you must keep using Wordle-branded Wordle (as opposed to one of their competitors).
Has this ever actually happened to anyone? I’ve seen it mentioned in several threads and it seems exceedingly implausible...
As stated in the article: The newspaper intends to increase its subscriber count to 10 million by 2025, and its focus on word games is part of its strategy.
There's a part of me that wants to spin up a new clone of this on a regular basis purely out of spite.
Clearly nobody cared about protecting the name before.
The whole reason Wordle is so popular is because all the stuff around it.
Just don't call it Wordle if you want to clone it. It's nearly the guy's actual name, maybe cut him a little slack.
See here for crosswords: https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051947672-New-...
Doubt they will ever go after un-named clones though.
The bigger risk is losing the trademark inside of people’s minds—which would have to happen first anyways. Similar to Velcro, which still legally has the trademark but to the public it’s genericized.
Over the years I have received cease-and desists from nice lawyers for Virgin Atlantic, The Coke-Cola Company (I had a Chrome extension called "Facebook Classic" that restored the reverse-chronological feed when FB started moving away from that), and an unofficial polite pre-lawyer request from The New York Times.
(Edit: I think I answered my own question: https://www.wordel.app. Author at https://twitter.com/m_yxnk/status/1498171177763803140)
At the time NYT acquired the Wordle site, clones of the site without any changes came up. One of them is wordle.nyc.
Since the original Wordle was completely self contained on the front end, you could just save the clone site locally (with the HTML, CSS and JS) and play it on a browser.
(That a side project punnily named after his last name became such a phenomenon)
Aside: bring back credit screens in software!
The southernmost bridge in NYC and New York State is Outerbridge Crossing (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outerbridge_Crossing>). Read up on how it was named.
See more here: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=cd3b3bbc-03d8...
/! ************************************** Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY
AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM
LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR
PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
******************************************These kinds of user-hostile actions are exactly why I will never support them.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-time...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/wordle-bans-slave-new-york-times-of...
Adding trackers is the expected move, when going from a hobby site to a publisher. This is something which has to be fixed systematically by proper legislation.
If you don't see how removing words off the wordlist impacts the experience, I really can't explain it to you, it's a tautology: removing words impacts the experience precisely by removing words. Because you can no longer use the removed word in gameplay, as you could previously. Therefore experience is impacted.
> Adding trackers is the expected move
It being 'expected' has no bearing on it not being palatable and being user hostile.
This is like saying stubbing your toe on a grain of sand impacts the experience of your foot.
Yes, you are technically correct that the Wordle experience has changed, but it hasn’t changed in a meaningful (or even noticeable) way for 99.9% of Wordle players.
If anything, the fact that the censorship is hard to notice makes it all the more pernicious and harmful.
For example, there are a huge number of English-language words that aren’t in every English language dictionary. Compare British English dictionaries to American English dictionaries. Is this censorship? Yes. Am I OK with it? Absolutely.
Removing a word because it is not in use in the region the dictionary is published is much like you wouldn't necessarily expect a dictionary in Portugal to be identical to a dictionary in Brazil. It is vastly different from removing words because the words are deemed offensive. We're not talking about the NYT removing British spellings like 'fibre', but rather words like 'bitch' or 'slave'.
That's like asking what's subscriber hostile about netflix taking movies off their service. Certainly limiting choice affects user experience.
> Adding trackers is the expected move, when going from a hobby site to a publisher.
Except that the NYT loves to attack social media about their trackers. Not only does the NYT track their users, they also charge them a fee for the privilege of being tracked.
> This is something which has to be fixed systematically by proper legislation.
NYT deliberately chose to track their users and sink to the level of facebook, google, twitter, etc.
Always shocked that there are NYT defenders. I'm also shocked people waste their lives on facebook, twitter, etc also. To be fair, I guess they'd shocked by how I waste time.
This might be a candidate for worst analogy of the month. Removing words is part of the game design, the words aren't 'content'. The NYT removed words with foreign roots you might not expect ("pupal" / "agora") in an English language game, as well as several insults which players may also not expect to be in a game without an age rating ("whore" / "pussy" etc.)
If the NYT were to remove words with foreign roots, there would be a lot more words removed than just 19. So no, that's not an adequate explanation.
> several insults which players may also not expect to be in a game without an age rating
Did you know that words have multiple meanings? But not even that, but that their standards meanings may not even be insulting at all? Like the word 'bitch'.
And then there are words like "slave", which are not insults.
And it may shock you but I do indeed know that words have multiple meanings. However I'm not really sure what's so hard to understand about the fact that the NYT is going to remove most controversial ones from a word game.
The most controversial words were not removed from the game. Unless you think "slave" and "bitch" (which were both removed) are more controversial than "cunts" or "fucks", which are both in the current NYT Wordle wordbank. This has been pointed out in multiple news articles, just in case the censors reading over the word lists in the first place somehow missed them (and yet didn't miss 'agora'), so it's an open question as to why 'cunts' is OK but 'slave' or 'agora' or 'wench' are not.
The words are content. How can you say it isn't content, when the words are what you are trying to guess? Otherwise, why would you be so supportive of censoring them?
> The NYT removed words with foreign roots you might not expect ("pupal" / "agora") in an English language game
Most of the words in the english language have foreign roots. And pupal and agora are words most semi-educated people would know. This justification is worse than my bad analogy.
> as well as several insults which players may also not expect to be in a game without an age rating ("whore" / "pussy" etc.)
How is "whore or pussy" an insult when used in a game? Calling someone that would make it an insult. Otherwise, it is just a word. "oh won't you think of the children" isn't a valid argument and using children to push a political agenda has got to stop. I played scrabble as a kid and whore and pussy are in the scrabble dictionary. So is dick in case you were wondering.