New York Times to take legal action against Scots language Wordle Game

Josh Wardle's daily puzzle game Wordle arrives in 2021. Millions of people loved playing Wordle, and thousands of developers wanted to create games like Wordle. Variations such as Nerdle (a Wordle for math), World (a Wordle for geography), Herdle (a Wordle for music), and Taylored (a Wordle for Taylor Swift fans) quickly emerged.

 

With a lot of clever touches on the Wordle formula, there are plenty of Wordle-like models that offer an almost identical Wordle experience without variation (Infinite Wordle is a version of Wordle that you can play more than once a day). The New York Times, which bought the Word from Ward in 2022, is now beating some of them.

 

As Jason Koebler reported on 404, The New York Times has filed a DMCA notice against coder Chase Wackerfuss, who created a Word clone called React and posted the code on GitHub. And where it starts to snowball, the DMCA notice doesn't just target React, but all Wordl clones that have been "forked" from the open-source React repository — and the number of forks is 1,900 or more.

 

There are a lot of games in a single DMCA notice. It apparently involves a clone where the answer to every new day is ALWAYS CHUNK.

I Hear Dee will be taking down all versions of their Wirdle game at the earliest opportunity. They have been in contact with other minority language groups around the world who are doing the same.

 

A spokesperson for the NYT said: "The Times has no issue with individuals creating similar word games that do not infringe The Times’s 'Wordle' trademarks or copyrighted gameplay.

 

"The Times took action against a GitHub user and others who shared his code to defend its intellectual property rights in Wordle. The user created a 'Wordle clone' project that instructed others how to create a knock-off version of The Times’s Wordle game featuring many of the same copyrighted elements.

 

"As a result, hundreds of websites began popping up with knock-off 'Wordle' games that used The Times’s 'Wordle' trademark and copyrighted gameplay without authorisation or permission. GitHub provided the user with an opportunity to alter his code and remove references to Wordle, but he declined."