In brief: Wordle is one of those games that has spawned a lot of imitators. You can find them filling up app stores, often with some slight variation on the original. It’s something that Wordle’s owner, The New York Times, isn’t happy about, and has issued takedown requests that could impact thousands of clones.
In 2022, when Wordle was at the height of its popularity, The New York Times bought the game for a low seven-figure sum. The newspaper fully moved Wordle over to its website a couple of weeks later. It remains free to play, but it’s recommended that users create a NYT account so they can play across devices and platforms while retaining progress stats.
It appears that The Times wants to ensure players aren’t tempted to stray to similar games. 404 Media reports that the company has filed a series of copyright takedown requests asserting that it owns not just the Wordle name, but also familiar elements of the game, including the 5 x 6 grid, green tiles to indicate correct guesses, yellow tiles to indicate the correct letter but the wrong place within the word, and the keyboard directly beneath the grid.
After filing two DMCA takedown requests against Wordle clones on GitHub last month, the publication has gone after Chase Wackerfuss, creator of Reactle, another Wordle-like game that is made in React JS (JavaScript).
The NYT wants GitHub to delete the Reactle repository along with all the forked repositories it is based on, of which there are almost 2,000. The Times’ DMCA notice reads, “This gameplay is copied exactly in the repository, and the owner instructs others how to knock off the game and create an identical word game.”
One of those affected is I Hear Dee, a version of the game in the Shetland dialect. Shetlandic is derived from the Scots dialects and spoken in Shetland, an archipelago to the north of mainland Scotland. There are only about 11,000 people who can speak the language, yet I Hear Dee has gained around 20,000 users in 113 different countries during the two years it’s been around.
The Reactle GitHub page has now been taken down by Wackerfuss, who told 404 media he didn’t want to get into a legal battle with the New York Times.
The New York Times is currently in the middle of a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its content to train their AI systems.
