The New York Times, which owns the popular word game app Wordle, has filed a DMCA notice against 1,900 clones inspired by the game.
404 Media reported that the Times—which purchased the game in 2022—filed several notices over Wordle clones created by GitHub coders, citing its ownership over the Wordle name and copyrighted gameplay, including the 5x6 layout and its gray, yellow, and green color scheme.
The first notices were filed in January against unofficial Korean and Bosnian language versions of the game.
Additional requests were filed this week against Wirdle - a variant created by dialect group I Hear Dee in 2022 to promote the Shaetlan language - and Reactle, an open-source Wordle clone built using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind, which was developed prior to the Times's purchase of the game, according to its developer, Chase Wackerfuss.
GitHub stated that Reactle's code had been copied around 1,900 times, allowing developers to build upon it to create a wide variety of Wordle-inspired games that used different languages, themes, and visual styles, some of which were "substantially different" from the original game.
The DMCA notice against Reactle also targeted all of the games forked from the original Reactle code on GitHub, alleging that spinoffs containing the Wordle name have been made in "bad faith" and that "gameplay is copied exactly" in the Reactle repository.
Wackerfuss has since removed the game, telling 404 Media that he does not want to get into a legal battle with the Times.
On the other hand, Wordle itself was criticized for being similar in layout to Lingo, a 1980s game show that focused on players guessing five-letter words, with a grid that changed color based on accuracy.
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