Using the DMCA to target hundreds of Wordle-likes, the publication claims exclusive rights in the game’s grid dimensions and color scheme.
Fresh on the heels of filing an infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times Co. is flexing its copyright muscles once again, this time targeting the developers of hundreds of games inspired by Wordle, the popular word game the Times purchased in 2022. While some of these games are straight-up clones, others share little in common with Wordle beyond basic game mechanics, which, as I’ve discussed before, typically aren’t protected by copyright.
The Times’s DMCA Gambit
Rather than send targeted takedown notices directed at each offending clone, the Times dropped the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s equivalent of a chain reaction bomb against the developer of “Reactle,” an open-source Wordle clone that’s been forked and adapted nearly two thousand times to create various new games. The Times’s takedown notice to the popular code hosting platform Github (read here) claimed that because the Reactle repository includes “step by step instructions on how to create a clone of the Times’s copyrighted ‘Wordle’ game,” there is “no recourse but to remove the entire repository in order to stop the spread of willful copyright infringement.”
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