> We have given the owner a chance to remove all references to Wordle and alter his code to not infringe The Times’s copyright, but he has doubled down on knocking off The Times’s copyrighted content.
This is just false. The owner of the original Reactle repo (now deleted) was never contacted previously.
I don’t understand why lawyers aren’t disbarred when caught flat out lying in contracts, injunctions and the likes. The fact that this behavior is considered “ok” reflects awfully on the entire profession.
I received the same email.
My repository is yf-dev/mahjong-hand-guessing-game, and it's a variant of the Wordle game with Japanese Rich Mahjong rules.
I don't think it's the same game as Wordle, because it's not a word-guessing game, and it has a 14x6 grid.
The name of the game is also inspired by Wordle, hence Mahjong Handle, but handle is a common noun that already exists, so I don't think there's a problem.
The game mechanics are not copyrightable (possibly patentable).
Obviously, borrowing art or design could be a copyright problem, but I have to suspect they're just blindly searching for "wordle" and sending takedowns to anything they see.
The only thing I can imagine here is that many of the games have "dle" or "le" suffixes and sometimes even describe themselves as "Wordle, but...". It seems more likely that it's NYT's lawyers hoping to bully the "competition".
I bet some NYT is planning some changes to Wordle use/tracking so they have to clamp down on the competition. They will likely requiring NYT login just to play, or adding additional ads to page
In general you can't copyright game mechanics, but trade dress laws provide a loophole around that. You can legally protect how a game is presented, and in some cases that's intrinsically tied to the game mechanics enough that you can't really get around it, which is how The Tetris Company has been able to effectively lock down the exclusive rights to the Tetris mechanics and successfully sued those who tried to make a Tetris clone without their approval.
I got the same email today for a fork of `thesam73/wordle`
I still have mixed feelings about this one. Because if let's say someone is learning web dev and thinks of building such clone and open sources it on GitHub, isn't that stopping people from learning?
Edit: Seems like the author does not want to fight NYT and hence disabled the repo. I think that's ok and I'll do the same (they also want all forks to be gone)
Readit News
Full notice is here: https://enterprise.githubsupport.com/attachments/token/cx6V4...
> We have given the owner a chance to remove all references to Wordle and alter his code to not infringe The Times’s copyright, but he has doubled down on knocking off The Times’s copyrighted content.
This is just false. The owner of the original Reactle repo (now deleted) was never contacted previously.
Deleted Comment
Isn't Wordle effectively just a game UX pattern? How is that copyrightable?
Obviously, borrowing art or design could be a copyright problem, but I have to suspect they're just blindly searching for "wordle" and sending takedowns to anything they see.
Deleted Comment
I still have mixed feelings about this one. Because if let's say someone is learning web dev and thinks of building such clone and open sources it on GitHub, isn't that stopping people from learning?
Edit: Seems like the author does not want to fight NYT and hence disabled the repo. I think that's ok and I'll do the same (they also want all forks to be gone)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240306171920/https://github.co...