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I’m not a Wordle player so I was confused about why they’d shut down the archive part of their acquisition. Reading closer, the “Wordle Archive” was a Wordle c
by PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I’m not a Wordle player so I was confused about why they’d shut down the archive part of their acquisition.
Reading closer, the “Wordle Archive” was a Wordle clone site that allowed people to play old Wordles.
No surprise that they’d be asking clone sites, especially those using both the trademark and exact content, to shut down. You can’t expect to clone Wordle, call it Wordle, use the Wordle words, and expect the Wordle owners to look the other way. This seems like a non-story.
- makeitdouble 5y agoI think it's fine to have "dog bites man" stories. NYT paying money for a property and aggressively trying to defend is totally expected, but still a story worth conveying.
- cush 5y agoA small indie dev got $1M+ for the name “Wordle” and NYT wants to own the brand. It’s not “dog bites man”… it’s a complete non-story.
- giraffe_lady 5y agoIt's not news but it can still be a story. This is the kind of decision editors make, this is part of what people mean when they talk about editorial stance. A publication whose only editorial goal is to give you novel information would not report "orphan crushing machine crushes 80 orphans, as it has every day since it was activated" since you probably already know about that. OTOH people are hitting adulthood every day never having heard of the orphan crushing machine, and you want to give them a chance to say "excuse me the what??" "System working as intended" isn't new information, but making people consider the effects of that intention can be valuable. We might in fact want it to work a different way if we think about it for a bit.
- cush 5y agoYou got hyper fixated on my use of the word _story_ and completely missed my actual point. NYT bought "Wordle" from an indie dev for $1M+. The article complains about the fact they're protecting their newly-bought and very expensive IP. The orphan-crushing analogy is a strawman, because Josh Wardle wouldn't have been incentivized to protect the IP. The incentive to protect "Wordle" happened when $1M+ was exchanged and has nothing to do with NYT as a company. Any company or person would do the same.
- xref 5y ago> Any company or person would do the same. Definitely not a given, NYT made a choice to act aggressively to monetize their IP and can bear the consequences of doing so. A classic example is Metallica suing their own fans who downloaded their music, and Radiohead who let fans name their own price for an album including $0. In all 3 cases above, all parties got to choose their own actions which all have their own outcomes.
- cush 5y agoIt’s not a classic example because NYT is (just like Radiohead) giving away Wordle for $0 You don’t think Radiohead has ever taken legal action to protect their IP? Radiohead sued Lana Del Ray because one of her songs sounded like Creep. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with protecting your personal brand. And it’s even less aggressive with NYT because they can only cease the use of their “Wordle” trademark
- alar44 5y agoIdk, wordle isn't really new and isn't something you should be able to own. It'd be like claiming to own tic tac toe or rock paper scissors. It's just too simple imo.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoI can't tell because it has been taken down—was the Wordle archive using the original game's javascript code, or was it a complete rewrite? Wordle is entirely client-side, so it would have been easy to do. The game concept (probably) isn't copyrightable, but the code certainly is.
- IanCal 5y agoThe word list is absolutely copyrightable however.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoThat's not actually obvious to me—is it a creative work? I doubt Patrick Wardle manually wrote out every word in the array.
- IanCal 5y agoThe word list of acceptable answers isn't, that's just essentially all 5 letter words. The actual answer list is a manually curated list of words (cut down from 10-15k to 2-3k), chosen to be good fun to play with.
- cush 5y ago“Wordle” is a trademark that NYT owns
- dehrmann 5y agoApparently a few entities own it: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4805%3Aa95uyr.1.1&p_search=searchss&p_L=50&BackReference=&p_plural=yes&p_s_PARA1=&p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA1%24LD&expr=PARA1+AND+PARA2&p_s_PARA2=wordle&p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA2%24COMB&p_op_ALL=AND&a_default=search&a_search=Submit+Query&a_search=Submit+Query https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4805%3A...
- notadev 5y agoWordle is basically Bulls and Cows (or a text-based Mastermind). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls_and_Cows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls_and_Cows
- xg15 5y agoPoint is, the clone existed before Wordle was acquired and had never been a problem before.
- dymk 5y agoNot sure what weight that point is supposed to carry. It was a ripoff of the IP before the sale, and it was a ripoff of the IP after the sale, and the owner (whoever it is at whatever point) can send a cease and desist.
- ipaddr 5y agoIt becomes fair use because the ip owner did not enforce copyrights before.
- dragonwriter 5y agoThat's not how copyright, or specifically copyright fair use, works.
- ipaddr 5y agoTrademarks can be lost by not enforcing rights. Wordle is a trademarked name. The game play is not under copyright. Only the art is under copyright and extract words in some order to some extent
- tedunangst 5y agoAnd lookie here, the owner is enforcing their rights.
- ipaddr 5y agoAnyone can bring a case for any reason. Let's see how this plays out.