New York Times takes down third-party Wordle Archive

Wordle Archive, a website that let users play through hundreds of previous daily Wordle puzzles, has been taken down at the request of Wordle owner The New York Times.

The play feature that is not available in the official version of Wordle has been on the archival site since early January. The New York Times requested that the Wordle Archive be taken down, but it was taken down last week.

A New York Times representative said that the usage was unauthorized and that they were in touch with them.

As of March 5, the Wordle Archive is still fully accessible at the Internet Archive. You can find other sites that allow you to play Wordle puzzles, as well as sites that allow you to play unlimited Wordle puzzles.

The treatment of Wordle Archive by the Times indicates that some of those sites may be under threat.

Are any clones safe?

The five-letter guessing game underlying Wordle is not an original idea. Lingo, a game show that dates back to the 80s in the US and other countries, popularized the concept. Wordle players are familiar with the two-player pen-and-paper game Jotto, which dates back to 1955. The game Bulls and Cows has been played since the 19th century, according to one source.

The basic design of Wordle would not be protected by The New York Times. The game's basic guessing mechanic is hard to protect with anything other than a patent, which would be difficult to acquire in this case.

Advertisement

Mark Methenitis, an attorney in Dallas, told Ars that a lot of people have a hard time with the idea of protecting a copyrighted expression.

The Times' interest in Wordle is less ambiguous when it comes to trademark, which protects the game's name and branding. The New York Times filed for a Wordle trademark on February 1, the day after the paper announced its seven-figure purchase of the game from original creator Josh Wardle.

The company can go after any other product that uses the Wordle name, even if there is a risk that an average user will confuse it with an official Times product. There are a lot of web games with the Wordle name out there, as well as spin-offs that integrate the Wordle trademark.

Other games that use the "-dle" suffix to connote broad Wordle similarities—a la Windle, Nerdle, or Worldle—aren't completely in the clear either. The Tetris Company has brought trademark lawsuits against games with names that are only similar to the original Tetris. And that's to say nothing of games that copy Tetris' gameplay and presentation outright, showing there is a level of direct game cloning that a court won't tolerate.

In January, before the NYT acquisition, Apple removed a number of Wordle clones from the App Store after they received negative social media attention. Section 4.1 of the App Store guidelines tells developers to come up with their own ideas. Make yours come to life, we know you have them. Don't copy the latest popular app on the App Store or make some minor changes to another app's name orUI and pass it off as your own.

Wordle is free to play, but the company hasn't committed to the game's long-term status.