Battle of the words

I have a confession to make: I am addicted to Wordle. And Spelling Bee. I can’t let a day go by without playing both. With Wordle, I have to guess the word to make a long sequence, preferably every day.

The aim of Spelling Bee is to find the longest possible words using a fixed number of letters generated by the game, whereby each word must always contain the central letter. My goal is to guess the bonus words, marked in bold.

What I didn't know is that Wordle was invented by Josh Wardle and released in 2018 as an online game. In early 2022, the game was sold to the New York Times, which filed the trademark in the United States and a priority application in the EU immediately afterwards.

It’s a good job that the New York Times did this, as a German person had the same idea and filed a German registration and a priority international registration for the European Union, among others. Remarkably, the priority date is the same as New York Times' US application: 1 February 2022. Who then has the oldest rights?

As expected, the fight is on to claim the name Wordle. You could say that Wordle was filed in bad faith by the German party, but that is not a ground for opposition, as this means having to wait until a trademark is registered before starting a cancellation action. The New York Times’s opposition to the application is based on an unregistered right. This is interesting but generally difficult to prove. We have certainly not heard the end of this!