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.
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.
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?