I can't prove it, but I am quite sure NYT got a positive ROI on the acquisition of Wordle. They paid in the low single millions of USD, which isn't much for a brand as big as Wordle had become by then (2 million+ daily players) and it's been used to drive new digital subscriptions [1]. It's diminished somewhat since then but it has remarkable staying power. I can tell that from the Google Trends data [2] as well as the anecdata that I and so many of my friends and family still play Wordle every day.
[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.]
You can look at the comments section to see how popular it is, oftentimes there are a few hundred comments. That is higher than most NYT news stories (back when I used to use their website).
I guess the question is how many people play around on the weekends. I could believe those still playing have a daily ritual when they play a match after logging into work.
Especially considering wordle has no unique gameplay. Its a very, very old game with a million variations. There was even a TV show called lingo or something that did competetive wordle. The only thing NYT owns is a brand since the game is hundreds of years old.
> 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.
Indeed. I know this from TV, grew up with it. Was a fun educative program back in the days.
Siblings have mentioned the TV game show Lingo. I can't precisely date Bulls and cows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls_and_cows), but it's hard to imagine that it (the gameplay, if not that particular pen-and-paper game) isn't much older than television, hence than Lingo.
If this is true, why wouldn't Microsoft patent the taskbar or directory structure tree layout pattern in Explorer?
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".
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.
Maybe you can't copyright gameplay, but you can still sue someone for infringement anyway, or even just threaten people with lawsuits that you know they can't afford to defend themselves against so they'll do whatever you want no matter what their rights are. The Times might even win in the courts if it ever gets that far. You can't copyright a musical genre either but that hasn't stopped successful lawsuits against musicians for exactly that (https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-copy-a...).
Suing when your case has no merit is a losing strategy. Eventually you not only lose to someone who stands up to your bullying, you face massive damage to your reputation; something media companies really don't like.
You can patent game mechanics - famous example would be Legend of Zelda's targeting system. Apparently Nintendo is extremely aggressive about patenting game mechanics.
Yeah I stopped playing it pretty quickly. There was that not-wordle game where you had to not get the word. It made me realise just how tricky failing wordle was.
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.
Wow, that seems super hard but unusable on desktop for me. No native keyboard support? I could overlook that, but the letter reveal is extremely slow to load for me. Could be an issue on my end.
Here's a curated awesome-wordle list [1]. Back in the days (as if it is long ago) I used a different one and had quite some fun with some of the clones (I didn't check this specific one).
This repo still being up shows they probably didn't just auto-takedown every repo that has the word "wordle" in its name at least. Often not the case with DMCA abuse.
Just tried Semantle, which I hadn't heard of before.
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.
> The New York Times — which purchased Wordle back in 2022 — has filed several DMCA notices over Wordle clones created by GitHub coders, citing its ownership over the Wordle name and copyrighted gameplay including 5x6 tile layout and gray, yellow, and green color scheme.
This smells very similar to the issue with the tetris clone a number of years ago. The overall issue is that while games aren't copyrightable, the look and feel of a game can be copyrighted.
That ruling is really exasperating. The judge not accepting that the size of the tetris field is part of the rules of tetris is really weird to me. The tetronimoes don't even look similar in their comparison given the constraints of shapes made of four blocks, and, like, the texture obviously looks nothing like original tetris, it's just some basic-ass rendering of a shape with some color.
Gameplay can't be copyrighted, but in the case of Worldle, the word lists are probably copyrightable.
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.
I doubt it. The existence of the words themselves is a fact, which is not copyrightable. Only their arrangement can be. Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
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.
Indeed. The creator of wordle started with a reasonably exhaustive list of ~13000 five letter words. That list won't be copyrightable.
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.
What's your basis for that? I'm very skeptical. Intuitively, whether a word is within the working vocabulary of a sample of the population is an objective fact, not creative expression.
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 case law is linked above, the "Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co" lawsuit that sets some minimum guidelines for what counts as a copyrightable arrangement of facts. And that standard is pretty low, it basically just requires some kind of authorship.
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.
> Sigh. If you refuse to actually read the findings of Feist...
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."
This is either confusingly written, or what the NYT said is confusing. The article refers to the source code being forked. That would be copyrightable. But I wouldn’t refer to the source code as “gameplay”.
> citing its ownership over the Wordle name and copyrighted gameplay including 5x6 tile layout and gray, yellow, and green color scheme.
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...
Mechanics can't be copyrighted (unless it's MTG tap mechanic, it seems), but what is weird is apparently the projects it went against were in different languages that Wordle doesn't cover (which I think matters considering Wordle is about guessing words) and using a different name.
The MTG tap mechanic was patented, not copyrighted.
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.)
Lots of other games have the same mechanic as MTG’s tapping. But to avoid legal threats from WotC/Hasbro, most of them call it exhausting or refreshing or other similar words.
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.
I agree that the claim to “tapping” is likely legal bullshit that’s only practically effective because nobody who would want to fight Hasbro over it can afford to do so.
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.
If you work in a field that’s built around intellectual property law, as any creative field including software is, it behooves you to be sufficiently familiar with it to understand that MTG’s tap mechanic was patented not covered by copyright.
This feels like a trademark question, not a copyright question. Seems like an abuse of DMCA; if only it were easier to ensure companies filing fraudulent DMCA claims end up facing real consequences.
Why wouldn't they allow keyboard input to type the words? Nobody has time to select each individual letter with the up/down arrows. I get it's an emulated game but there must be a way to hook keyboard input.
As the other person who replied said, it's a game meant to run on the Game Boy which has no keyboard. The intended use case is not in a JS web emulator, that is just a way for people to preview it before downloading.
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.
Certainly possible and probably not too hard, there are code examples from the late 90's and early 2000's for using ps2 keyboards. But not enough people have the keyboard link port adapter to make it worth implementing.
Does anyone know if anything like https://www.threemagicwords.app/
is going to receive a DMCA takedown? It is somewhat similar to Wordle and yet quite different.
GTFO NYT lol it is well established that gameplay mechanics are not subject to copyright. The level of presumption and disrespect and ignorance about the culture is pretty par for the course for the goons running the NYT.
If someone makes a FOSS version that can be easily dropped onto a public server somewhere, then we should all host a Wordle clone. (I'm sure the code has already been written a thousand times over…)
Almost all of these clones are FOSS, and can be dropped onto a server somewhere. Hell, the most common way to implement the game has everything on single html page with a javascript file that handles the entire game's logic and word list.
A company wants to enforce its copyright, etc., fine. That's their right to do so. Although I beg to differ with our copyright laws.
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.
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.
#/media/File:Lingopuzzle.svg){kind=link}
> > 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.