Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last two years then you’ve definitely heard of Wordle, and if you’ve been enamored by the word crafting game like millions of others then you’ve probably also seen the hundreds of spinoff attempts.
More than a year after buying out the rights to host Wordle, the New York Times is cracking down on clones of the quick-hit word game that keep appearing online, with NYT’s lawyers going straight to the source. This week, a total of three DMCA takedowns have been issued towards clones of Wordle on GitHub, a 404media report unveiled.
Two of these takedowns were issued way back in January 2024, but the most recent against coder Chase Wackerfuss doesn’t just look to remove Reactle from GitHub, but in the process will also take down almost 2000 clones that have been crafted since its release. Code for Reactle has been forked and repurposed 1,900 times, meaning there are a lot of clones using this code for their version of Wordle. This shouldn’t be any real surprise as many of Wordle’s spinoffs have received huge popularity over the last 12 months.
Reactle was actually created prior to Wordle being bought by the New York Times its creator told 404media. That doesn’t matter though, because the copyright the New York Times owns over Wordle includes elements like its 5×6 grid, green tiles to indicate when guesses are right, and several other details that have been copied in spinoff games.
By targeting Reactle, the New York Times has found a way to issue DMCA requests to all of the programmers who forked the code. The outlet also told 404media while it is taking steps to defend its intellectual rights, it has no issue with “individuals creating similar word games that do not infringe The Times’s ‘Wordle‘ trademarks or copyrighted gameplay.”
