The New York Times is filing copyright claims against hundreds of copies of its acclaimed word game, Wordle, to take them out of action.
The newspaper has filed the complaints under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act claiming that all games with names similar to Wordle are in ‘bad faith’.
Wordle was purchased by NYT in 2022 and made free to play for everyone. However, it has led to multiples clones of the game in all sorts of languages.
One big reason for the copies spawning is a game called ‘Reactle’. The game was created by a programmer named Chase Wackerfuss using JavaScript libraries React, TypeScript, and Tailwind.
Since the code for Reactle was open-source, it has been used by dozens of other developers to make their own games.
However, the NYT is targeting Reactle in a copyright claim despite the fact that the code was written before the newspaper acquired Wordle.
Wackerfuss, wary of a legal battle with the media giant, has removed his game. However, the NYT is also targeting the games based on Reactle’s source code.
“The Times has no issue with individuals creating similar word games that do not infringe The Times’s “Wordle” trademarks or copyrighted gameplay,” NYT told 404media.
However, it admitted that it had filed a complaint against ‘a GitHub user and others who shared his code’ whose Wordle clone had allowed others to make copies of the game.
“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 authorization or permission,” the Times added.
Meanwhile, a CNBC article in 2022 claimed that the game itself was a copy of a 1980s game named ‘Lingo’.
