New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with DMCA takedowns
theverge.com
theverge.com
> > The Times has no issue with individuals creating similar word games that do not infringe The Times’s “Wordle” trademarks or copyrighted gameplay.
Can you really copyright “gameplay”?
This seems like pointless bullying by the Times, who is probably just upset they haven’t got a positive ROI on their acquisition of a free game.
[1] https://www.afr.com/technology/why-on-earth-did-the-new-york... [2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
[Edit: And, nearly two years on, they say they get "millions" of players per day, and they've assigned a dedicated Wordle editor and write articles about the game frequently. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/upshot/wordle-bot-year-in...). They're definitely not having buyer's regret.]
March 7 - Wordle 992 - 1,748,583 players
March 8 - Wordle 993 - 1,749,500 players
To get these go to:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-bot.h...
then "Compare and review recent scores" -> Next page -> on on the "Your Recent scores" select "view analysis" against the game number -> Next page
Doesn't seem to work with anonymous browser unfortunately.
Free games on Epic Store don't make me buy games on Epic Store. I just claim the free goodies and buy on Steam.
Indeed. I know this from TV, grew up with it. Was a fun educative program back in the days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show)#/me...
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law....
I don't think you would be granted a design (let alone utility) patent that is as broad as "green and yellow blocks have significance, is a grid of 5x6, and has a keyboard below".
Not a lawyer though so what do I know
This one refers to Wordle in the spec (which implies it's well known) and cites 5 other patents. Not knowing how Wordle works, I wouldn't speculate as to their chances of getting a patent, but NYT seems to be pursuing a copyright approach for now.
https://kotaku.com/nintendo-is-trying-to-patent-some-really-...
Bruce E. Boyden
https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...
In any case, Wordle is too damn easy. Don't think I've ever lost. I recommend sedecordle for word enjoyers
I still do "where taken", which is photos of countries, tradle for oec trade commodities and guess the game for video games. They're all far more interesting than guessing some random word.
I don't want to spoil today's puzzle, but after getting a few hints and giving up to get the answer, I don't see any relation between the hints and the answer.
(The similarity scores are word2vec cosine similarity, and that's fun to see in action, but the results make me think word2vec isn't that good.)
Edit: I tried yesterday's word and that was much better. Today's word might just be word2vec's kryptonite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC0kie6dPjo
Maybe the copyright is on the colors on the game field?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Holding,_LLC_v._Xio_Int...
Any clone that derives their own word list is probably fine, but any clone that copy/pastes the exact word lists from wordle (especially the shorter list of 2,315 possible solutions) is probably infringing copyright.
However, to be copyrightable, the arrangement has to be expressive, i.e., it must "possess the requisite originality because the author . . . chooses . . . in what order to place them."
My strong suspicion is that Wordle's word list is randomized. Not a chosen expression of the author.
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...
The Originality Requirement for Compilations
A compilation may contain several distinct forms of authorship:
• Selection authorship involved in choosing the material or data that will be included in the compilation;
• Coordination authorship involved in classifying, categorizing, ordering, or grouping the material or data; and/or
• Arrangement authorship involved in organizing or moving the order, position, or placement of material or data within the compilation as a whole
But the first prototype wasn't so fun, because it would often pick a word the player didn't even know existed.
So the creator (and his partner) manually classified the entire list based on if they knew the word or not; splitting the list into two groups, words which might appear as solutions and words that won't appear as solutions but will still be accepted.
This manual classification step and splitting it into two groups makes a very good argument for the wordlists meeting the criteria for copyright.
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2022/01/wordle-game-creator-wardle...
Do you know of any case law to the contrary?
And, as it turns out, it was the author's girlfriend who categorized each of the words. Not the author. If there is copyright in the selection (which I doubt), NYT doesn't appear own it.
The courts care about amount the method used to create the collection. You are right that if the wordlist had been created by selecting the top ~2000 words from an objective vocab survey or a frequency of use list, then it's unlikely to be eligible.
But the wordle wordlist wasn't created that way, it was "authored". They also filtered out offensive words.
> as it turns out, it was the author's girlfriend who categorized each of the words. Not the author. If there is copyright in the selection (which I doubt), NYT doesn't appear own it.
That's a bold claim. Nobody has seen the wordle sale paperwork, but I'm willing to bet that the lawyers went out of their way to make sure the copyright of the wordlist was assigned to NYT and the creator's partner was fairly compensated.
One of the primary reasons for sale was because the creator didn't want to deal with all the clones, so they would have bought in expensive intellectual property lawyers to make sure the sale was done right.
You have cited no case law to support your wild, speculative claim about how it applies in this case.
You have cited no factual source for your wild, speculative claims that Wardle's partner was deemed to have a copyright interest in the word list or transferred such interest to NYT.
If you refuse to actually read the findings of Feist (or at very least the wikipedia page [1] that does a good job of summarising the ruling and it's implications), then I'm not really sure I can be bothered to repeat and expand upon the above explications of how it applies to this case.
To quote wikipedia:
The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (facts, discoveries, etc.) from any source is fair game, but cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author. That includes not only the author's own comments, but also their choice of which facts to cover, which links to make among the bits of information, the order of presentation (unless it is something obvious like alphabetical), evaluations of the quality of various pieces of information, or anything else that might be considered the author's "original creative work" rather than mere facts.
The key part for this case being "Their choice of which facts to cover".
> You have cited no factual source for your wild, speculative claims that Wardle's partner was deemed to have a copyright interest in the word list or transferred such interest to NYT.
How can I? As I said, nobody has seen the paperwork, so there is no factual source that says either way. And it really doesn't matter. What does matter is the possibility that NYT do have the correct paperwork.
There is no way to be sure about the possibility that the wordlist might be copyrighted (or not) and who actually owns the copyright, short of a full court case on this exact issue.
I'm not a lawyer. But I suspect any intellectual property lawyer who was asked about this topic would advise their client against using the offical wordle wordlists. Not because they know for sure, but out of caution.
Besides, it's really not that hard for someone to derive their own wordlist from base principles (as you have pointed out above). We are only talking about a few days of effort if they take the same approach of manual classification and the piece of mind for closing a possible legal venerability is (in my opinion) more than worth it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
Well, since I've litigated this issue in federal court (with a major credit bureau as our client), I feel pretty confident I have read Feist in its entirety quite a few times. Perhaps you should reconsider your approach here.
> the piece of mind for closing a possible legal venerability
This is moving goal posts. The advice I would give a client is a question of acceptable legal risk and cost-benefit analysis. By contrast, you claimed that there was "a very good argument for the wordlists meeting the criteria for copyright," which is a different question that sounds solely in legal analysis.
I have only done a cursory search, but I am not aware of any case law that establishes that a list of words based on whether the word is known, rather than on a creative editorial decision, is amenable to copyright. When asked, you became emotional and condescending, rather than providing any support for your position. As it stands, there appears to be no basis in law or fact to support your "very good argument."
I thought you were arguing that a collection of facts can't be copyrighted, full stop. Hence me getting very confused about why you were refusing to accept Feist as case law that collections of facts could be copyright in some situations.
But now I see that you are actually arguing that the wordle wordlist simply don't count as an arrangement of facts. I kind of just assumed it was obvious that the wordlist counts an arrangement.
We aren't talking about a partially complex arrangement. It's simply a list of 12,972 words that have been split into groups. The group of 2,315 words that might be possible solutions and the group of 10,657 words that will also be accepted as guesses.
The Feist decision points out any arrangement can be copyrighted as long as it meets the criteria of originality, and it sets a pretty low bar for originality. I'm of the opinion that the method used to author the wordle wordlist far exceeds the criteria. Feist states "Originality requires only that the author make the selection or arrangement independently (i. e., without copying that selection or arrangement from another work), and that it display some minimal level of creativity."
So this is referring to trademark (the name Wordle) and copyright — but not patent. It makes sense to go after people who are using the same actual name, since this clearly infringes the trademark, and because if you do not enforce ("police") your mark against minor players, you can end up losing the ability to enforce it against major players.
But the copyright bit is a bit novel from my perspective (lawyer, but not copyright lawyer). If you had asked me what a copyright claim about Wordle would be about, I would have said the precise code. I might have wondered about the specific word lists, even though these would probably fail the "phone book" test (don't remember the case, but these were deemed uncopyrightable). I never would have thought about the tile layout and color scheme. That seems more like what I think of as "trade dress" [1] or perhaps something related to patent (which wouldn't apply here, unless the original Wordle owner had filed for patents a long time ago.
Are there any copyright lawyers who can elucidate how the tile layout and color scheme might be subject to copyright law? I assume the NYT has good lawyers, and has thought long and hard before going after folks on github...
https://www.reddit.com/r/onlyconnect/comments/169j2p4/have_y...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en , claims 4, 5, and 6 - expired in 2014. The actual symbol is also a copyright and trademark, I believe, but right now other games can us the 90 degree rotation.
(Disney's Lorcana, for example, uses 90 degree rotation and calls it 'exerting' a card.)
I’m skeptical that there’s any valid legal claim there, but if it is more legitimate than well-funded big-corp lawyer bullying, it’s either a trademark claim or a claim that any game with a card-refresh mechanic called “tapping” must be a derivative work of MTG for copyright purposes.
But trademark claims over individual words in specific covered contexts are a reasonable consumer protection measure, even if the “tapping” thing isn’t legitimately in that scope. It’s completely reasonable that, in most countries worldwide, I can’t legally produce a new laptop today and commercially market it as an Apple computer without permission from Apple Inc.
It is simply "our name in your face, on a regular basis, for years" advertising, at a global scale.
Case in point : here we all are, thinking and talking about the NYT.
That is the ROI.
NY Times issues DMCA takedowns of Wordle clones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618193 - March 2024 (44 comments)
Or my other game https://redactle.net which sounds ever so similar to wordle so you had better send your lawyers.
Or what about https://memorycardsgame.com - I mean it has a grid layout so surely that must be copyrighted too.
I will file any complaints into my computers /dev/null disk.
You can also see in the downloads there IS support for the game boy clone megaduck laptop that has a keyboard, if you have one of those.
In Spanish media it was usually called "Deducción".
Link in Spanish as proof:
http://pasatiemposmatematicosdelaprensa.blogspot.com/2013/10...
The last puzzle it's from 1999.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230709023951/https://www.teleg...
Er, sorry; an “experience” company.
No, what I find objectionable about the NYT games team, such as their spelling bee puzzle, is that they selectively deem certain words not valid responses. Not curse words or words with no redeeming value, but words that are perceived to be derogatory against disadvantaged groups or "offensive". It's like an extension of the hyper sensitive liberal newsroom.
Fine, it's a private organization and their choice. But it reflects in my mind a hijacking of the language by people oversensitized to the point of ridiculousness.
The _game_ won't accept responses of such a nature? That doesn't sound too bad.
These word games are for casual fun and enjoyment.
It's really not a big deal whether a particular word is included or not in the dictionary for a particular game. For Spelling Bee, the levels appear to be calculated based on the word list, so while it may be a little frustrating that a particular real (albeit off-colored, so to speak) word isn't accepted, rest assured that that doesn't doesn't affect the puzzle's difficulty. So no harm done. IMO, if some particular word removes more fun than it adds, good riddance.
Personally, I was most offended when "ichor" was not accepted, though I'm happy to say their reporting mechanism seemed to work, because it seems to be accepted now at least in the pangram game.