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New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with DMCA takedowns

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Re: New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with DMCA takedowns

#111

Post by torstenvl »

phire wrote: post #108
torstenvl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your basis for that? I'm very skeptical. Intuitively, whether a word is within the working vocabulary of a sample of the population is an objective fact, not creative expression. Do you know of any case law to the contrary? And, as it turns out, it was the author's girlfriend who categorized each of the words. Not the author. If there is copyright in the selection (which I doubt), NYT doesn't appear own it.

The case law is linked above, the "Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co" lawsuit that sets some minimum guidelines for what counts as a copyrightable arrangement of facts. And that standard is pretty low, it basically just requires some kind of authorship. The courts care about amount the method used to create the collection. You are right that if the wordlist had been created by selecting the top…

I am the one who cited Feist.

You have cited no case law to support your wild, speculative claim about how it applies in this case.

You have cited no factual source for your wild, speculative claims that Wardle's partner was deemed to have a copyright interest in the word list or transferred such interest to NYT.

Re: New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with DMCA takedowns

#112

Post by jkaplowitz »

mynameisnoone wrote: post #100
jkaplowitz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of other games have the same mechanic as MTG’s tapping. But to avoid legal threats from WotC/Hasbro, most of them call it exhausting or refreshing or other similar words. I’m skeptical that there’s any valid legal claim there, but if it is more legitimate than well-funded big-corp lawyer bullying, it’s either a trademark claim or a claim that any game with a card-refresh mechanic called “tapping” must be a deriv…

Fuck the "owning" of terminology laying claim to individual words. It's utter horseshit.

I agree that the claim to “tapping” is likely legal bullshit that’s only practically effective because nobody who would want to fight Hasbro over it can afford to do so.

But trademark claims over individual words in specific covered contexts are a reasonable consumer protection measure, even if the “tapping” thing isn’t legitimately in that scope. It’s completely reasonable that, in most countries worldwide, I can’t legally produce a new laptop today and commercially market it as an Apple computer without permission from Apple Inc.

Re: New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with DMCA takedowns

#113

Post by standardly »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #36
CannisterFlux wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I stopped playing it pretty quickly. There was that not-wordle game where you had to not get the word. It made me realise just how tricky failing wordle was. I still do "where taken", which is photos of countries, tradle for oec trade commodities and guess the game for video games. They're all far more interesting than guessing some random word.

Perhaps that was Don't Wordle? That was eye-opening to me too. Play it before NYT sues it out of existence I guess: https://dontwordle.com

Wow, that seems super hard but unusable on desktop for me. No native keyboard support? I could overlook that, but the letter reveal is extremely slow to load for me. Could be an issue on my end.

Re: New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with DMCA takedowns

#114

Post by phire »

torstenvl wrote: post #111
phire wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The case law is linked above, the "Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co" lawsuit that sets some minimum guidelines for what counts as a copyrightable arrangement of facts. And that standard is pretty low, it basically just requires some kind of authorship. The courts care about amount the method used to create the collection. You are right that if the wordlist had been created by selecting the top…

I am the one who cited Feist. You have cited no case law to support your wild, speculative claim about how it applies in this case. You have cited no factual source for your wild, speculative claims that Wardle's partner was deemed to have a copyright interest in the word list or transferred such interest to NYT.

Sigh.

If you refuse to actually read the findings of Feist (or at very least the wikipedia page [1] that does a good job of summarising the ruling and it's implications), then I'm not really sure I can be bothered to repeat and expand upon the above explications of how it applies to this case.

To quote wikipedia:

The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (facts, discoveries, etc.) from any source is fair game, but cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author. That includes not only the author's own comments, but also their choice of which facts to cover, which links to make among the bits of information, the order of presentation (unless it is something obvious like alphabetical), evaluations of the quality of various pieces of information, or anything else that might be considered the author's "original creative work" rather than mere facts.

The key part for this case being "Their choice of which facts to cover".

> You have cited no factual source for your wild, speculative claims that Wardle's partner was deemed to have a copyright interest in the word list or transferred such interest to NYT.

How can I? As I said, nobody has seen the paperwork, so there is no factual source that says either way. And it really doesn't matter. What does matter is the possibility that NYT do have the correct paperwork.

There is no way to be sure about the possibility that the wordlist might be copyrighted (or not) and who actually owns the copyright, short of a full court case on this exact issue.

I'm not a lawyer. But I suspect any intellectual property lawyer who was asked about this topic would advise their client against using the offical wordle wordlists. Not because they know for sure, but out of caution.

Besides, it's really not that hard for someone to derive their own wordlist from base principles (as you have pointed out above). We are only talking about a few days of effort if they take the same approach of manual classification and the piece of mind for closing a possible legal venerability is (in my opinion) more than worth it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

Re: New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with DMCA takedowns

#115

Post by [deleted] »

phire wrote: post #114
torstenvl wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the one who cited Feist. You have cited no case law to support your wild, speculative claim about how it applies in this case. You have cited no factual source for your wild, speculative claims that Wardle's partner was deemed to have a copyright interest in the word list or transferred such interest to NYT.

Sigh. If you refuse to actually read the findings of Feist (or at very least the wikipedia page [1] that does a good job of summarising the ruling and it's implications), then I'm not really sure I can be bothered to repeat and expand upon the above explications of how it applies to this case. To quote wikipedia: The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (…

[deleted]

Re: New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with DMCA takedowns

#116

Post by torstenvl »

phire wrote: post #114
torstenvl wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the one who cited Feist. You have cited no case law to support your wild, speculative claim about how it applies in this case. You have cited no factual source for your wild, speculative claims that Wardle's partner was deemed to have a copyright interest in the word list or transferred such interest to NYT.

Sigh. If you refuse to actually read the findings of Feist (or at very least the wikipedia page [1] that does a good job of summarising the ruling and it's implications), then I'm not really sure I can be bothered to repeat and expand upon the above explications of how it applies to this case. To quote wikipedia: The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (…

> Sigh. If you refuse to actually read the findings of Feist...

Well, since I've litigated this issue in federal court (with a major credit bureau as our client), I feel pretty confident I have read Feist in its entirety quite a few times. Perhaps you should reconsider your approach here.

> the piece of mind for closing a possible legal venerability

This is moving goal posts. The advice I would give a client is a question of acceptable legal risk and cost-benefit analysis. By contrast, you claimed that there was "a very good argument for the wordlists meeting the criteria for copyright," which is a different question that sounds solely in legal analysis.

I have only done a cursory search, but I am not aware of any case law that establishes that a list of words based on whether the word is known, rather than on a creative editorial decision, is amenable to copyright. When asked, you became emotional and condescending, rather than providing any support for your position. As it stands, there appears to be no basis in law or fact to support your "very good argument."

Re: New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with DMCA takedowns

#117

Post by phire »

torstenvl wrote: post #116
phire wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. If you refuse to actually read the findings of Feist (or at very least the wikipedia page [1] that does a good job of summarising the ruling and it's implications), then I'm not really sure I can be bothered to repeat and expand upon the above explications of how it applies to this case. To quote wikipedia: The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (…

> Sigh. If you refuse to actually read the findings of Feist... Well, since I've litigated this issue in federal court (with a major credit bureau as our client), I feel pretty confident I have read Feist in its entirety quite a few times. Perhaps you should reconsider your approach here. > the piece of mind for closing a possible legal venerability This is moving goal posts. The advice I would give a client is a que…

Sorry, I might have misinterpreted your argument.

I thought you were arguing that a collection of facts can't be copyrighted, full stop. Hence me getting very confused about why you were refusing to accept Feist as case law that collections of facts could be copyright in some situations.

But now I see that you are actually arguing that the wordle wordlist simply don't count as an arrangement of facts. I kind of just assumed it was obvious that the wordlist counts an arrangement.

We aren't talking about a partially complex arrangement. It's simply a list of 12,972 words that have been split into groups. The group of 2,315 words that might be possible solutions and the group of 10,657 words that will also be accepted as guesses.

The Feist decision points out any arrangement can be copyrighted as long as it meets the criteria of originality, and it sets a pretty low bar for originality. I'm of the opinion that the method used to author the wordle wordlist far exceeds the criteria. Feist states "Originality requires only that the author make the selection or arrangement independently (i. e., without copying that selection or arrangement from another work), and that it display some minimal level of creativity."

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