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Tuesday afternoon, Wordle’s search of the iOS App Store has found a handful of apps that resemble the name and game of the simple word game that went viral in recent weeks. But none of these iOS apps were made by Josh Wardell, the Brooklyn-based software engineer who created the free web-based game last October.
All of these copying apps are now gone, apparently the result of a delayed cleanup by App Store reviewers after some attention on social media. But that probably doesn’t mean the end of Wordle clones. These documents quickly remove the complex legal and social landscape around copy applications and the protection that developers can claim for their gaming ideas.
Who owns Wordle?
To begin with, it is important to note that the basic five-letter guessing game underlying Wordle is not in itself a completely original idea. The same basic gameplay was popularized by Lingo, a game show that dates back to the 1980s in the United States and other countries. The two-player game with pen and paper Jotto, dating back to 1955, would also be very familiar to Wordle players. Previously, a more traditional version of the game, called Bulls and Cows, had been played since the 19th century, according to at least one source.
Conveniently, none of this story is a legal issue for Wordle itself. “Whenever you have copyright, you defend the expression, not the idea,” Dallas lawyer Mark Metenitis told Ars. “It’s a line that a lot of people have a lot of difficulty with, especially when you go into games.”
In other words, it is extremely difficult to protect copyright in the mechanics of abstract play, such as “guessing five-letter words and giving clues based on correct letters.” A game developer can file a patent for an original game idea, a legal process that has been used to stifle video game clones in the past. But obtaining a patent is a long and difficult process that can fall apart if there is a “prior art” prior to the idea (or if the mechanic can be considered “obvious” from a legal point of view).
Trademark, free for everyone
Apart from copyright or patent, the trademark could at least legally protect the Wordle name from being exploited by imitators. But unlike copyright, which applies automatically when a work is published, trademarks offer very limited protection until and unless they are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
A quick search on the USPTO website shows two previous brands of software called Wordle, one from 2010 and one from 2013. Both were abandoned shortly after their initial filing, but Wardell apparently did not apply for his own commercial brand of its suddenly popular name.
This left the Wordle trademark legal to seize, a situation that a company called Monkey Labs Inc. is taking advantage of. On January 7, this outfit filed its own trademark application for Wordle, claiming ownership of the name of a computer software download application for social networks, namely to publish, display or display information in the field of electronic games via the Internet. namely word puzzle software. “
There may be grounds for revoking this trademark for misrepresentation under the Lanham Act of 1947, but any such legal argument can be a difficult battle. This is especially true because other games and applications used the name before Wardle was created. There are currently three games in the iOS App Store – Word !, Wordle – Word Puzzle and Wordles — years before the Wardle version. Although none of them have any mechanical resemblance to the current virus hit, they have as many claims to the historical use of the name “Wordle” as anyone else.
The clone attack
Putting the trademark aside, the copyright laws that protect Wordle itself help protect anyone who wants to create their own version of the same basic idea. This means that the law cannot do much to stop the existence of other five-letter guessing games. Readers of Ars Technica may recall a similar explosion of an iOS clone that collided with Vlambeer’s Radical Fishing and Super Crate Boy, as well as Genoa Chen fl0w, Spry Fox’s Triple Town and countless others.
But while idea Wordle is not very legally protected, the game is specific expression so it’s a clone that copies the user interface, layout, and other design elements of Wardle’s version may still be against the law. As early as 2012, The Tetris Company used this argument to close a particularly blatant one tetris cloning in the App Store.
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