The New York Times is stepping up copyright fights over online games that it argues are too similar to its popular Wordle puzzle. One of the paper's takedown requests went to a Minneapolis software engineer.
404 Media reports on the newspaper's campaign against clones of Wordle, an online game in which players get six chances to guess a five-letter word. The Times acquired the game in 2022 in a seven-figure deal.
Since Wordle's debut, hundreds of variants have sprung up: Wordle-but-longer, Wordle-but-harder, Wordle-but-with-pictures, Wordle-but-with-maps. (I typed "Birdle" on a whim into an Internet search and yes, there's a Wordle-but-with-birds clone out there, too.)
The Times sent at least at least three takedown requests against programmers who hatched Wordle clones citing the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. One of the most significant of those filings, 404 notes, is against Chase Wackerfuss, a Minneapolis software engineer who made a Wordle variant called Reactle and posted it on a software-sharing depository called GitHub. Reactle, in turn, has been tweaked by others to create hundreds more variants.
Wackerfuss told 404 that his work on Reactle predated the Times' purchase of Wordle and that he's removed the game from GitHub.
Wackerfuss also talks to National Public Radio, which has its own report on the Times' takedown requests, noting that the various Reactle variants were made by people who wanted to learn programming skills and develop their own games. "It's just a shame we're losing this software and the community around it," he said.
