Researcher in the streets, sleepless in the sheets. Video games pay my mortgage.
As reported by 404 Media, famous internet puzzle rightsholder and imperialist rag The New York Times has decided that they own the exclusive copyright to 5x6 grid games using green and yellow to indicate correct placement of glyphs.
Triage below the cut.
decided to write about this shit because it gets me fired up and i wanna help keep people informed
It's all just variations on Bulls And Cows, which is far older than computers and AFAIK has no known inventor. It's like trying to copyright the gameplay of Hide And Seek.
Hold on. I am no lawyer, but from what I understand, it is not the concept that is owned by the copyright holder, but the source code. So if it is in a different language, does New York Times has a leg to stand on, legally speaking?
I mean, I know the answer is "doesn't matter, they will bury you in court case fee" but just for my own personal understanding, am I correct?
In this case it appears that they are attempting to claim ownership over the expression of the game (the tiles, the colours, the shape of the grid, the keyboard entry pad), which is actually historically easier to defend ownership of. Their attack of the repo is based upon it creating an identical expression, even though it uses completely different code. Hope that clears it up!
But there's prior art, as mentioned in the article, in the form of a game show called Lingo, which already uses many of the claimed elements. The NYT would have a terrible time defending this in court if it got challenged.
it's weird that they mention "copyrighted gameplay" because iirc you cannot actually copyright that
You cannot. Historically it's been patented but I have no idea if those were ever enforced or even enforceable. Copyrights don't cover concepts, such as gameplay, only implementations, such as an actual product based on that gameplay.
Motus was big-ish in France and only stopped airing in 2019. Both it and Wordle directly cite the board game Mastermind as an inspiration. This is ghoulish of the NYT.
