World is THE game so far this year. However, two days ago, a search for the word “Wordle” in the App Store already returned a handful of applications that mimicked the name and playability of the simple word game that has gone viral in recent weeks. The funny thing is that none of those apps had been created by Josh Wardle, the Brooklyn software engineer who created the free game last October. That is why Apple has recently launched a (belatedly) elimination of the copies that were obstructing the store and the future of Wordle.
This probably doesn’t mean the end of Wordle plagiarism. Something that reflects the complicated legal landscape that surrounds copycat apps and the protection mechanisms that developers have when claiming their original ideas.
Who owns Wordle? For starters, it’s important to know that the basic five-letter guessing game underlying Wordle is not itself an original idea. The same game was popularized by Lingo, a game show from the 1980s in the US. The two-player pen and paper game Jotto, which dates back to 1955, will also sound familiar to Wordle players. Before that, since the 19th century a more traditional version of the game called Bulls and Cows was played.
In reality, none of this story is a legal problem for Wordle. “As long as you are copyrighted, you are protecting the expression, not the idea,” explained attorney Mark Methenitis in this Ars article. In other words, it is extremely difficult to copyright an abstract game mechanic such as “guess five letter words and give clues based on the correct letters”. A game developer can apply for a patent on an original idea, a legal process that has been used to strangle video game clones in the past. But obtaining a patent is a long and arduous process.
What happened? Aside from trademarks, the same copyright laws that protect Word help protect anyone who wants to make their own version of the same idea. That means there isn’t much the law can do to prevent other five-letter guessing games from existing. While Wordle’s idea is not very legally defensible, the game-specific expression of that idea is. Therefore, a clone that copies the user interface, layout, and other design elements from Wardle’s version could still break the law.
Attack of the clones. And the same thing has happened. Creator Zach Shakked, was particularly cheeky when brag on Twitter about the sudden success of its clone version for iOS, which earned hundreds of subscriptions for the “premium” option of € 30 a year. It wasn’t long until a famous programmer I will criticize it on Twitter, prompting Shakked to defend himself defiantly: “Wordle is a copy of another game” and “Wordle, the word is not a trademark, and there are a bunch of other unrelated word applications that have the same name.”
Shakked also claimed that he was “already working on an update with a different user interface” that could circumvent any copyright claims. Although in the end ended up admitting it: “I realized I crossed a line. And surely I will never do anything remotely like this again. I screwed up.”
This guy shamelessly cloned Wordle (name and all) as an F2P iOS game with in-app purchases and is bragging about how well it’s doing and how he’ll get away with it because Josh Wardle didn’t trademark it. So gross. pic.twitter.com/kIs8BypuRA
– Andy Baio (@waxpancake) January 11, 2022
A free brand for all. Aside from copyrights or patents, a trademark could at least legally protect the Wordle name from being exploited by copycats. But unlike copyrights, which are automatically applied when a work is published, trademarks offer very limited protection until they are registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office.
A quick search of the USPTO website shows two previous marks for the software called “Wordle”, one from 2010 and one from 2013. Both were abandoned shortly after their original filing, but apparently Wardle has not filed his own trademark in his name. That has put the “Wordle” trademark legally at stake, a situation that has also been exploited by a company called Monkey Labs Inc. On January 7, they filed their own trademark application for “Wordle.”
Apple’s role. Beyond legality, there are defined ethical and even reputational issues with the shameless cloning of a popular idea. Apple tries to offer some protection against this, using its App Store guidelines to stop the spread of game plagiarism (with questionable success). Section 4.1 of those guidelines specifically calls out “copycats”, telling developers directly to come up with their own ideas: “We know you have them, so bring yours to life. Don’t just copy the latest popular app on the App Store “.
However, that clause provides an interesting twist in the case of Wordle, because the game was built as a web application without an official native version from the App Store. This left a loophole for developers to exploit. There is no way for an app creator like Word to claim their name in the App Store, nor is there any way for them to include their website to get users to the right place. The final twist was as expected: Apple has ended up removing all copies of Wordle from its store.
The original spirit of the game. Unlike Zach Shakked, who tried to monetize Wordle, original creator Josh Wardle promises that the viral game will remain free and ad-free. It is their spirit and raison d’être: “I don’t understand why something can’t just be fun. I don’t have to charge people money for this and ideally I would like to keep it that way. There are also no ads and I’m not doing anything with their data, and that’s pretty deliberate too. “