[mryall]

> In a statement to 404 Media, the Times said:

> > 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.

[dougb5]

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.

[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.]

[user_7832]

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).

[slyall]

The Website has stats on the number who play each game (and their moves).

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.

[david422]

That is ... amazingly consistent.

[fbdab103]

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.

[jokethrowaway]

Why would someone playing wordle subscribe to the NYT?

Free games on Epic Store don't make me buy games on Epic Store. I just claim the free goodies and buy on Steam.

[yunohn]

I and many people I know have bought this: https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/games

[c3534l]

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.

[Fnoord]

> 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.

[lacoolj]

Pretty sure there's a new reboot of this show right now too

[leereeves]

Yeah, Wordle is clearly a copy of Lingo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show)#/me...

[JadeNB]

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.

[lupire]

And Jotto, 1955

[archontes]

You cannot copyright gameplay.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law....

[reactordev]

but you can patent it.

[karaterobot]

> The publication has filed several DMCA copyright requests

[brewdad]

You can’t expect a lawyer to know the difference between copyright and patents.

[lacoolj]

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".

Not a lawyer though so what do I know

[helloworld]

Microsoft did patent the taskbar. [1]

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5920316A/en

[AlbertCory]

No you can't.

[lbotos]

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en here is a patent for Magic the Gathering.

[reactordev]

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070226648A1/en

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10369470B2/en

You most certainly can

[AlbertCory]

https://patents.google.com/patent/US11786805B1/en

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.

[autoexec]

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...).

[AlbertCory]

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.

[dabernathy89]

You can patent game mechanics - famous example would be Legend of Zelda's targeting system. Apparently Nintendo is extremely aggressive about patenting game mechanics.

https://kotaku.com/nintendo-is-trying-to-patent-some-really-...

[torstenvl]

Irrelevant, since NYT does not and can never (due to prior art) hold a patent on Wordle's gameplay. This is about copyright.

[deprecative]

Nintendo is a litigation company pretending to be a game developer.

[tomkarho]

Another example that comes to mind is the Nemesis system from Mordor games

[interestica]

Games and Other Uncopyrightable Systems

Bruce E. Boyden

https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...

[standardly]

Not sure why you're grayed out - no, you cannot copywrite gameplay. The name "Wordle" could be protected, though, which is probably the case here.

In any case, Wordle is too damn easy. Don't think I've ever lost. I recommend sedecordle for word enjoyers

[CannisterFlux]

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.

[lastofthemojito]

Perhaps that was Don't Wordle? That was eye-opening to me too. Play it before NYT sues it out of existence I guess: https://dontwordle.com

[standardly]

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.

[CannisterFlux]

Yeah that's the one.

[Fnoord]

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).

[1] https://github.com/prakhar897/awesome-wordle

[extraduder_ire]

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.

[autoexec]

Does it use the same wordlist as wordle or have they specifically chosen words that would be impossible to not get?

[CannisterFlux]

I don't know if it was the same list, but the words were possible to not get.

[gnicholas]

They’re apparently also claiming that the offenders are using forked code, which would be subject to copyright.

[kelnos]

Wordle is a trademark. That's not what the DMCA is for.

[lbourdages]

Semantle is nice but very difficult. You have unlimited tries, though.

[leereeves]

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.

[lbourdages]

I haven't played a whole lot but sometimes it definitely makes more sense than others.

[pgrote]

Lingo seems like Wordle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC0kie6dPjo

Maybe the copyright is on the colors on the game field?

[Kluggy]

> 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.

[Verdex]

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Holding,_LLC_v._Xio_Int...

[ben0x539]

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.

[hiccuphippo]

Specially since Wordle's gameplay is a straight copy of Bulls and Cows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls_and_cows

[pests]

Except wordle provides positional information.

[phire]

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.

[torstenvl]

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.

[lupire]

The selection is expressive.

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

[phire]

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.

Source: https://slate.com/culture/2022/01/wordle-game-creator-wardle...

[torstenvl]

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.

[phire]

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.

[gnicholas]

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”.

[sidewndr46]

When you have the kind of connections the NYT does and the lawyers to go along with it, sure!