I am aware that Scratch projects are shared under a sharealike Creative Commons license. I forget exactly which one it is, but I know it’s different than Snap!'s. I’m not sure this is still the case, though, because Scratch’s new ToS leaves out project licensing information. If I were to convert someone else’s Scratch project to a Snap! one, then modify and share it in Snap!, provided I give credit, is this legally okay to do, or can I only convert a Scratch project I made 100% myself?
IANAL, but it sounds to me like if you want an authoritative answer you should ask on the Scratch forum, rather than here, since it’s their license terms you’re worried about.
It’s fine with us for you to import someone else’s Scratch project, with credit of course. (That’s a moral requirement no matter what the license says.) If you publish it here, you are licensing your version CC-BY-NC-SA. Whether you can do that depends on the terms of their license.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll ask on the Scratch forums. I (think) Scratch projects are shared under CC-BY-SA 2.0, but Scratch project licenses are a bit of a gray area now that Scratch no longer specifies what license projects are shared under.
Is it even legal to hide your license and then try to enforce it?
Are they even enforcing a license?
Update: Yes, Scratch does have a new license, but it doesn’t allow sharing projects outside of Scratch. So that answers this question.
Good grief. They didn’t used to be so lawyery. FWIW, our TOS allows and even encourages users to use CC BY-SA as an alternative to CC BY-NC-SA but we don’t require BY-SA. But yeah, it does seem that they no longer require user content to be licensed in a way that allows offsite use.
PS We moderate the forum differently from how they do, but that doesn’t mean our moderation is inadequate in any absolute sense. :~(
How does this apply to users who haven’t logged in the past year? They have not agreed to the license.
Aww, just because they’ve gotten all lawyery doesn’t mean you have to. ;~) They still say you own your projects; if you want to let other people use your projects offsite, you still can. If you want to export someone else’s project in order to remix it here (or anywhere else), the polite thing is to follow the author’s wishes about that.
Actually, now that they and y’all have called this question to my attention, I’m not sure that we really mean to require our users to let third parties post their projects (or remixes thereof) to YouTube or TikTok or whatever. We just want to encourage remixing among our users, same as they do. It’s really the same reason we don’t require you to allow other people to use your projects for profit, even though that’s the official “free software” rule. I believe in free software, but I don’t want to require you to. Maybe we should follow Scratch’s lead in this?
I’m more worried about the hint that they aren’t our friends any more! It may be true that none of the people we know on the Scratch Team are still there…
I think everyone should be free to use their projects how they want outside of profiting and illegal activities (whatever you define as such)
Why don’t you ask?
Also—@ego-lay_atman-bay pointed this out to me privately, but a moderator removed the mention of Snap by name from all posts in that thread.
Yep and also pls dont name that platform
Why don’t you ask?
Next time I’m back east. That’s not really a conversation to have by email.
a moderator removed the mention of Snap by name from all posts in that thread.
Yeah I saw that. That’s part of what worries me.
They have done this with the excuse of “user security” and “protection from potential cyberattacks” for a long time, I’m honestly surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. No good reason for this. After the whole ‘your projects are used to make AI more powerful’ thing, I sadly don’t think it’s very similar to what it used to be when I was there.
I’m honestly wondering what all the more ‘lawyery’ changes are for. I think scratch will be able to survive without them, like 
has done for years.
This statement from the FAQ is what I thought of when reading this thread:
Yeah, in the early days we knew everyone on the Scratch Team and they all knew us, and we were really tight. But they have staff turnover; most importantly, John Maloney left to work on GP and MicroBlocks. And Mitch Resnick is still at MIT working on other things. I’m not really in touch with anyone at Scratch anymore; maybe Jens is.
I’m just surprised because I’ve mentioned Snap multiple times on the Scratch forums under the impression it was allowed to be mentioned (like TurboWarp). I never got in trouble. Heck, even old Advanced Topics threads mention Snap from the time it didn’t have its own forum! The Scratch Wiki also talks at length about Snap and includes a link (which @highlanegamingstudio did not in their post). Based on the topic, it seems likely that at least one person reported the post based on its mentioning Snap, and that that is the only reason it got removed. It is possible that most of the Scratch Team is still friendly towards Snap, but that whichever moderator got involved isn’t aware of the situation.
I’m especially convinced by the guideline for posting links to other sites which would seem to allow Snap to be linked to, not just mentioned:
Q: What sites can users link to?
A: Many obscure sites are not allowed to be linked because they have ways to communicate privately. Scratch has public messaging, where everyone can see comments, and users are more respectful in the process. With private messaging, only intended recipients can see the message, therefore those users are more likely to be disrespectful. So the Scratch Team prefers to block these sites.This extends to social media sites, media sharing sites, sites with links to other unsafe sites, sites notorious for their inappropriate content, and any obscure sites that are not trusted.
However, YouTube is a bit different. Sharing YouTube videos is allowed as long as the content and comments are for all ages and don’t share personal information. Those same rules must be followed when linking YouTube channels, as well. Due to containing unmoderated chat, links to streams or premiers or channels with streams or premiers are not allowed.
Keywords: social media, streaming, youtube
this guy gem1001 is tarnishing our name with lies and slander
they’re just confused on what site the post was referring to
Fun fact: they didn’t actually remove all mentions of the site from my original post, they seemed to have missed the third one. I changed the question because I didn’t really have to mention that I was sharing it on Snap!. Also, I think they censored the name because this forum’s guidelines says that it has a “PG-13” standard. It’s kind of funny what happened after I removed all mentions of Snap! from that forum because one user thought I was talking about Penguinmod, which would’ve made much more sense to censor.
bh:
We moderate the forum differently from how they do, but that doesn’t mean our moderation is inadequate in any absolute sense. :~(
Forum guidelines:
We expect that the vast majority of our users will be at least 12 years old. That’s not quite 13, which is the conventional age in the US at which kids are allowed to hear occasional four-letter words at the movies, but we hope that any 12-year-olds here are mature. So our intention is to moderate the forum at about the PG-13 level. That means we’re not going to delete posts because of one questionable word. We’re much more worried about bullying. Don’t bully. Don’t call people names. Assume good faith, as they say at Wikipedia.
Scratch has three or four people whose job it is to moderate their site. We’re poor; we have zero paid moderators. We therefore rely on users to flag inappropriate content, bearing in mind the PG-13 standard.
That statement is almost certainly what got my post censored.
I bet they allow links, or at least mentions, to a zillion sites that are PG-13 or above but don’t mention an explicit rating. YouTube comes to mind, for example.
YouTube videos automatically redirect to Scratch’s embedded YouTube player, and links to 13+ videos or channels get deleted when the Scratch Team sees them. Even mentions of certain channels get censored. A better example is Cubeupload. Cubeupload is the most popular image hosting platform on the Scratch forums, and yet it contains a link to Discord in its footer.