War of the Wordle: New York Times in legal row with geography-based spinoff
The New York Times is taking legal action against an app it claims is too similar to their hit online game Wordle.
In the filing, the newspaper giant, who purchased the Wordle in 2022, claims the geography-based game Worldle is deliberately “creating confusion” among consumers.
In Worldle, which was created by software developer Kory McDonald, players are presented with a silhouette image and have six guesses to figure out what country it is.
Meanwhile, in Wordle, players have six attempts to guess a five letter word, with feedback on correct, incorrect, and misplaced letters.
The New York Times claims McDonald has attempted to take advantage of the “enormous goodwill” associated with their brand.
However, McDonald has said he will fight the lawsuit because there are numerous other games who also have similar titles.
“There’s a whole industry of [dot]LE games,” he told the BBC. “Wordle is about words, Worldle is about the world, Flaggle is about flags.”
In March, The New York Times filed several Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, takedown notices to developers of Wordle-inspired games.
The notices cited infringement on the Times’ ownership of the Wordle name, as well as its look and feel — such as the layout and colour scheme of green, grey and yellow tiles.
A New York Times Co. spokesperson said the company has no issue with people creating similar word games that do not infringe its Wordle "trademarks or copyrighted gameplay."
But the company took action against one user on software developer platform GitHub who created a “Wordle clone” project that included instructions on how to create “a knock-off version” of Wordle, and against others who shared his code.
"As a result, hundreds of websites began popping up with knock-off ‘Wordle’ games that used The Times’ ‘Wordle’ trademark and copyrighted gameplay without authorization or permission,” the spokesperson said.
GitHub gave the user an opportunity to alter the code and remove Wordle references, the spokesperson added, but he declined.
Software engineer Josh Wardle created Wordle and made it public back in 2021. In January 2022, he sold the daily puzzle game to the Times for a reported seven-figure sum.
The game rose in popularity becoming a viral sensation that inspired other games like “Heardle," the music version of Wordle, where you guess a song name within six listens, and “Queerdle," which uses words associated with the queer community.
