NY Times issues DMCA takedowns of Wordle clones (opens in new tab)

In that notice, they claim:

> 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.

Did you file a counter notice? I assume so since it's still up?

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".

IANAL. So long as you own a legitimate copyright, you can send a DMCA takedown about whatever you want. That doesn't mean it's 100% legally robust.

Or pay to play aka a NYT Games sub.

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.

Imagine that someone on the street said you have red shoes, but he had red shoes first. So you should remove shoes.

And you comply. But you're not sad about it - in your opinion it makes intellectual capital a value. E.g. you now believe it is worth to wear a particular color of a particular apparel first and so on.

The problem: it was never stated by some kind of an authority, that the bully was right. He might as well have been wrong, and you granted his wish to remove your shoes simply on the basis of, to put it lightly, not being assertive enough.

It's worded to imply that second sentence is linked to the first, but based on other comments here (about game design not being copyrightable) it looks like an attempt to mislead.

What on earth is "U.S. Copyright Reg. No. PA0002342355" I tried searching that string as well as the number itself on copyright.gov and in a search engine, but didn't find anything relevant. The web search did lead back to this set of comments though.

Green in the US is the common sense color for being correct (or having permission to proceed, as in the case of a green traffic light or a "not occupied" restroom indicator, but I digress). New York Times, ever heard of a green checkmark? "Give the green light" meaning "give approval"? Green means yes. Green means good. (It also means envy... NY Times is seeing green.)

Yellow to indicate the partial correctness of a correct letter in the wrong position? Probably the most valid part by far of the notification. Still stupid though, since yellow in the green-yellow-red traffic light color trinity can mean "between completely good (green) and completely bad (red)". Is the clone's use of yellow merely copying of NY Times' expression? Or is it an agreement to follow a "yellow is half-good" cultural norm too/instead?

Having an on-screen keyboard directly below the grid? The merger doctrine protects copying of the positioning [1]:

> A broader but related concept is the merger doctrine. Some ideas can be expressed intelligibly only in one or a limited number of ways. The rules of a game provide an example.[14] In such cases the expression merges with the idea and is therefore not protected.[15]

...

> The merger doctrine has been applied to the user interface design of computer software, where similarity between icons used by two different programs is acceptable if only a very limited number of icons would be recognizable by users, such as an image looking like a page to represent a document.[17]

There are only so few ways to reasonably orient/position an on-screen keyboard relative to the rest of the game elements without confusing the user. Top, bottom, left, right. Some of those four are less reasonable on different screen dimensions. (Sanity check: you're not gonna gonna force everyone else to put the on-screen keyboard off-center, are you?) Check out the case of the banana taped to a wall for an analogous merger doctrine case about angles rather than positions [2].

The existence of an onscreen keyboard is a functional element, and functional elements are ideas. The idea–expression distinction makes ideas uncopyrightable. My knowledge of copyright is US-centric, but I think the following argument from the Europe Union would fly in the US [1]:

> As stated by the European Court of Justice in SAS Institute Inc. v World Programming Ltd., "to accept that the functionality of a computer program can be protected by copyright would amount to making it possible to monopolize ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development."[7]

An onscreen keyboard is more accessible to people without working physical keyboards (phone users? broken keys?) or who don't want to use a physical keyboard because of their own functional preferences (or personal challenges, which are obviously not the game developer's expression. think "no A button" challenges). Additionally, having the keyboard's colors match the board's colors reduces the cognitive burden on the user of remembering which letters can't be used when the user looks at the onscreen keyboard.

The 5 wide grid is an uncopyrightable game rule. 5 is the length of a valid word. Changing the width of the game significantly changes the validity of the player's options. More substantially, the merger doctrine (only a small number of reasonable, distinct options = not copyrightable) applies to word lengths.

The 6 height grid is an uncopyrightable rule. You get 6 chances. Fewer chances means harder game. A particular game difficulty should not be exclusive to one party and therefore should not be copyrightable.

References to Wordle are a trademark issue. Does nominative use [3] in trademark law allow people to say "my word game is based off of <existing word game's name>?" Not sure. But I doubt that the clones' uses of the name "Wordle" cause market-changing customer confusion about which games are and aren't affiliated with NY Times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distin...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/20/court-finally-dismisses-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

I'm assuming that you're referring to the Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. case. My opinion is that only the color choices in Mino and possibly the placement of the next pieces display relative to the game board should've counted as infringement. Everything about the board size, the piece geometries, the piece movements, and the existence of the next pieces display, the number of pieces in the next pieces display, and the existence of 3D-like lighting should have been treated as ideas or functional elements with respect to the idea–expression distinction and the merger doctrine.

It was a popular game show in the Netherlands. Loved watching it as a kid.

Lingo and Jotto

The game is mastermind with letters. Even mastermind probably has prior art. Also, hard to say that there is a right to stop clones given rules aren’t copyrightable.