The New York Times has used a DMCA take down notice to remove an open source Wordle clone called Reactle
This to me sounds like a misuse of DMCA - it’s original open source code not stolen code, so the only “infringement” is dubious around whether you can clone a game or if a game belongs to whoever “owns” it. I can see they could have grounds to take the project to court to establish whether their copyright ownership of Wordle prevents anyone making their own version, but using DMCA for independently made code seems like a big overstep. Two corporations (Microsoft and the NYT) making decisions about whether software can be posted, and the poorly thought out DMCA rearing it’s head again.
Yeah and wordle didn’t invent any of the underlying game mechanics. It’s just Hangman + Mastermind
Game mechanics are also famously not copyrightable anyway.
My thoughts exactly. By this reasoning, Candy Crush Saga could get taken down for copying Bejeweled.
Also they only bought the domain, and haven’t patented any part of the game design…
Wordle is a ripoff of Lingo, first broadcast in 1987.
They can take themselves down.
I cloned the original website (it’s just a bunch of JavaScript) once the NYT deal went through and still self-host it. I changed a bunch of the UI text, specifically removing all the references to “Wordle,” and I think it’s just me and my friends that use it. Still works!
Same here. Didn’t even remove the Wordle mentions, just references to external resources and the Google tracking Javascript.
Oh, right – I definitely scrubbed the tracking stuff too. I wonder if that’s how all the clones were being found?
I used to maintain a wordle clone. I was meticulously making sure that any changes in the NYT word list would be reflected in my app as well, the goal was synchronization because the secret to wordle is that we’re all playing the same game… until we’re not. I haven’t touched that repo in months. The NYT can suck it.
