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.
I 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.
It'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.
You 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.
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.
Not 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.
Trademarks 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
I don't think "wordle" was a popular name for the game before it got popular on the internet, so a trademark makes sense in this case.
Of course Wordle is just Lingo but online. And Lingo is just televised Mastermind with letters instead of colours. Mastermind is an extension of Bulls and Cows and if you go back further I'm sure you can find another game like it.
There are some very big broadcasting companies that have put a lot of money into the "guess the word" genre and the New York Times probably know that they can't take down every game with similar rules.
The best they can do is find infringement of their trademark and pursue those who infringe upon it, or risk losing the trademark all together. They could also license the trademark, of course, but a blanket cease and desist letter is cheaper than negotiating a contract.
Been wondering about the trademark, there are a lot of variants with names also ending in -le (eg Nerdle, Semantle), would they be in any danger of getting a cease and desist? Asking for a friend ;)
I'm asking about the name because you can't patent gameplay afaik, so even if it was a straight clone, as long as the word list (and code?) was original it would be OK.
On the other hand I recall Worlds.com suing (somewhat successfully?) both Second Life and Minecraft, so maybe you can patent game concepts?
I 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.
The 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.
But it doesn't matter, you can't protect a game concept with intellectual property. Neither patents nor copyright allow this. The only thing that could be protected here is the name Wordle, the art assets (if there are any that are nongeneric enough), and the exact source code.
Secondly, everyone keeps mentioning (repeating?...) about this famous TV show in the UK; I have never heard of it until december. Reading the gameplay of the show on Wikipedia.... it sounds like an almost entirely different game, aside from the fact it (sometimes!) involves a 5 letter word, and you have to pick letters. Mastermind (the game), is so much closer
Well it's daytime TV quiz show, so no reason you would have heard of it. The first rounds are the same as wordle. See for yourself: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O5O7ZCvpItY
Unless those people could prove they independently created their Wordles before Wardle’s Wordle was created, it doesn’t legally matter. NYT owns the rights to “Wordle” over the similar clones.
This is the kind of dark-pattern/anti-consumer stuff you should expect if you must keep using Wordle-branded Wordle (as opposed to one of their competitors).
The relevance is that the NYT has a sordid history of user hostile actions, and this is just the latest in a long line of them. In other words, the relevance is in highlighting that this is kind of conduct is part of a pattern, not an aberration. This is relevant, as it helps situate the action.
It's likely that Wordle will become part of such a dark pattern in the near future.
As stated in the article: The newspaper intends to increase its subscriber count to 10 million by 2025, and its focus on word games is part of its strategy.
I for one am outraged, what are we mad at now? Honestly I don’t mind NYT, I ended up getting a sub to their Games and it’s fun enough and better for my sanity then doom scrolling. Also I cancelled auto renew immediately, easy peasy.
…unless you live in California. In some ways this is a minor issue, but it would be best for everyone, including subscription service providers, if this kind of thing were banned by law.
They don't cancel your subscription when your credit card number stops working. They keep charging you, and send the account balance to a collections agency. So hopefully you signed up with a fake name and fake address.
Do they keep letting you read the paper too? If not... well, I guess they can ask for whatever they want, but if you took it to court I can’t imagine you’d be on the hook for payment, your contract with NYT has clearly ended.
Has this ever actually happened to anyone? I’ve seen it mentioned in several threads and it seems exceedingly implausible...
It's happened to me. My credit card expired, I kept reading the Times without noticing that billing was broken, and I got a letter from a collections agency complaining on their behalf.
I really don't think so—Wordle is popular because of the network effect of posting scores on Twitter. All of the other stuff (the Wordle archive, Worldle, Absurdle, etc) is popular _because_ of Wordle.
Wordle existed for 5 minutes before NYT bought it (it's still only been around for 5 minutes, really.) It isn't surprising that Wardle didn't put together a legal department.
Just don't call it Wordle if you want to clone it. It's nearly the guy's actual name, maybe cut him a little slack.
People say this a lot but there aren’t many examples of this actually happening in legal matters.
The bigger risk is losing the trademark inside of people’s minds—which would have to happen first anyways. Similar to Velcro, which still legally has the trademark but to the public it’s genericized.
My understanding is that it happens enough that lawyers worry enough about it and therefore chase these things down constantly.
Over the years I have received cease-and desists from nice lawyers for Virgin Atlantic, The Coke-Cola Company (I had a Chrome extension called "Facebook Classic" that restored the reverse-chronological feed when FB started moving away from that), and an unofficial polite pre-lawyer request from The New York Times.
Does anyone know of a wordle that's in sync with the NYT's list of answers but uses the original dictionary? The NYT site doesn't work for me with uBO turned on (actually it barely works with it turned off).
From what I’ve seen over the slab of a few days in the past when NYT acquired the Wordle site, the word list has been changed in the current NYT game by removing/replacing (because NYT thought those are difficult) and reordering some words.
At the time NYT acquired the Wordle site, clones of the site without any changes came up. One of them is wordle.nyc.
Since the original Wordle was completely self contained on the front end, you could just save the clone site locally (with the HTML, CSS and JS) and play it on a browser.
I think it’s more about the fact that a dude who loves words and is a great programmer made this great word game, and happened to be conveniently named Wardle, in order for this nice little pun on his name to incur…
The gameplay rules of Wordle are not patented or protected. Anyone can make a clone with the same rules, just don't call it Wordle or use trademarked/copyrighted names associated with it.
Or literally copy the code. There was a Show HN for https://opensourcewordle.com/ (no longer works, [edit: found it] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185004) that took the obfuscated Javascript, replaced the URL, changed the license and repackaged it. When called out in the comments the author doubled down and insisted they emailed the original author and NYT. Anyway, a week later the website stopped working, github repository deleted, and (surprisingly, very rare and must have needed moderator manual action) the HN username changed from first-namelast to something random.
The Javascript bundle had some kind of Microsoft license. Not sure what that meant
/! **************************************
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY
AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM
LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR
PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
******************************************
If the bundle is minimized / obfuscated, and the license doesn't state which library or portion it applies to, then is it reasonable to say a well intentioned reader may think it applies to while thing?
What's user hostile in taking words off the list? I don't really see how that impacts the experience.
Adding trackers is the expected move, when going from a hobby site to a publisher. This is something which has to be fixed systematically by proper legislation.
> What's user hostile in taking words off the list?
That's like asking what's subscriber hostile about netflix taking movies off their service. Certainly limiting choice affects user experience.
> Adding trackers is the expected move, when going from a hobby site to a publisher.
Except that the NYT loves to attack social media about their trackers. Not only does the NYT track their users, they also charge them a fee for the privilege of being tracked.
> This is something which has to be fixed systematically by proper legislation.
NYT deliberately chose to track their users and sink to the level of facebook, google, twitter, etc.
Always shocked that there are NYT defenders. I'm also shocked people waste their lives on facebook, twitter, etc also. To be fair, I guess they'd shocked by how I waste time.
>That's like asking what's subscriber hostile about netflix taking movies off their service. Certainly limiting choice affects user experience.
This might be a candidate for worst analogy of the month. Removing words is part of the game design, the words aren't 'content'. The NYT removed words with foreign roots you might not expect ("pupal" / "agora") in an English language game, as well as several insults which players may also not expect to be in a game without an age rating ("whore" / "pussy" etc.)
The words are content. How can you say it isn't content, when the words are what you are trying to guess? Otherwise, why would you be so supportive of censoring them?
> The NYT removed words with foreign roots you might not expect ("pupal" / "agora") in an English language game
Most of the words in the english language have foreign roots. And pupal and agora are words most semi-educated people would know. This justification is worse than my bad analogy.
> as well as several insults which players may also not expect to be in a game without an age rating ("whore" / "pussy" etc.)
How is "whore or pussy" an insult when used in a game? Calling someone that would make it an insult. Otherwise, it is just a word. "oh won't you think of the children" isn't a valid argument and using children to push a political agenda has got to stop. I played scrabble as a kid and whore and pussy are in the scrabble dictionary. So is dick in case you were wondering.
> The NYT removed words with foreign roots you might not expect ("pupal" / "agora") in an English language game
If the NYT were to remove words with foreign roots, there would be a lot more words removed than just 19. So no, that's not an adequate explanation.
> several insults which players may also not expect to be in a game without an age rating
Did you know that words have multiple meanings? But not even that, but that their standards meanings may not even be insulting at all? Like the word 'bitch'.
And then there are words like "slave", which are not insults.
They have removed a lot more. You can try plenty of loan words from other languages that aren't available. The basis for the original game was 'Collins Scrabble Words 19' which omits words as well.
And it may shock you but I do indeed know that words have multiple meanings. However I'm not really sure what's so hard to understand about the fact that the NYT is going to remove most controversial ones from a word game.
> However I'm not really sure what's so hard to understand about the fact that the NYT is going to remove most controversial ones from a word game.
The most controversial words were not removed from the game. Unless you think "slave" and "bitch" (which were both removed) are more controversial than "cunts" or "fucks", which are both in the current NYT Wordle wordbank. This has been pointed out in multiple news articles, just in case the censors reading over the word lists in the first place somehow missed them (and yet didn't miss 'agora'), so it's an open question as to why 'cunts' is OK but 'slave' or 'agora' or 'wench' are not.
> What's user hostile in taking words off the list? I don't really see how that impacts the experience.
If you don't see how removing words off the wordlist impacts the experience, I really can't explain it to you, it's a tautology: removing words impacts the experience precisely by removing words. Because you can no longer use the removed word in gameplay, as you could previously. Therefore experience is impacted.
> Adding trackers is the expected move
It being 'expected' has no bearing on it not being palatable and being user hostile.
Did a lot of racists play Wordle on the NYT page? Is there a stormfront thread about it or something? I haven't really seen any news of racists being outraged by this; likely because many of the removed words are not racially-charged terms.
This is like saying stubbing your toe on a grain of sand impacts the experience of your foot.
Yes, you are technically correct that the Wordle experience has changed, but it hasn’t changed in a meaningful (or even noticeable) way for 99.9% of Wordle players.
If your criteria is some specific quantity instead of one around the ethics of censorship, would you likewise be OK with dictionaries removing a small percentage of words? Under the same pretense, that this removal would surely only impact .1% of those who may consult a dictionary in a meaningful (or even noticeable) way?
If anything, the fact that the censorship is hard to notice makes it all the more pernicious and harmful.
For example, there are a huge number of English-language words that aren’t in every English language dictionary. Compare British English dictionaries to American English dictionaries. Is this censorship? Yes. Am I OK with it? Absolutely.
> Compare British English dictionaries to American English dictionaries. Is this censorship? Yes. Am I OK with it? Absolutely.
Removing a word because it is not in use in the region the dictionary is published is much like you wouldn't necessarily expect a dictionary in Portugal to be identical to a dictionary in Brazil. It is vastly different from removing words because the words are deemed offensive. We're not talking about the NYT removing British spellings like 'fibre', but rather words like 'bitch' or 'slave'.
Yeah, I’m fine w/ the NYT’s chosen deletions. It’s their game and their rules. Wordle’s not a dictionary, it’s a game and a game’s owners get to set the rules. In this case, the acceptable words are a big part of the rules.
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.