Hi~

I'm sure this question has come up many times, but I'm still not quite sure: Are you allowed to use copyrighted material, such as songs or images, in your projects? I thought this would be okay since I'm not selling them or anything, but I just wanted to make sure that this was allowed if I give credit to the source of the material.

Thanks,
The-Marauders

You can use copyrighted material in your projects as long as you are using it under the conditions of Fair Use. On Scratch, this basically means that as long as your project isn't a blatant violation of copyright law (such as a pirated song), it's allowable.

However, if a company decides to issue a DMCA - basically, they say that your project is illegally using their intellectual property, Scratch will take it down without much of a fight, because they don't have the legal resources to fight the claim (and, as it were, it honestly wouldn't be worth it).

Legally, a lot of projects that are allowed on Scratch probably infringe on copyright law. The only protections that they use under Fair Use are being educational and being nonprofit, so it's questionable whether they are seriously protected. But most copyright holders won't choose to attack Scratch projects for copyright infringement, because of several reasons:

• The copyright holder may not feel that Scratch is a huge enough threat to the marketability of their original product, so it wouldn't be worth the time to hunt down on the infringing projects.
  
• The copyright holder may be happy that kids are learning programming through their copyrighted work, and don't want to discourage that form of education.
  
• The copyright holder may be worried about a hit to their reputation from pursuing copyright claims on kid's work, which can look pretty bad.
  

So, basically: as long as your project isn't blatant, purely uneducational copyright infringement (reuploaded songs), your project will not be taken down - even if it does legitimately break copyright law - unless the copyright holder pursues.

Note that there have not really been instances of something like a perfectly-copied game or animation - it's possible that the Scratch Team would take something like that down because it does blatantly break copyright law, but I imagine they wouldn't because something like that would actually take effort.

Also note that if you are trying to make a legitimate project that is definitely legal, and not based on handwaving about Fair Use protection for education, it would be worth it to either make sure your project fulfills the standards for Fair Use to an acceptable extent (for example, if you make a parody) or to seek proper licensing for the copyrighted work you wish to incorporate.

Finally, note that I don't actually have any legal training, so it's very possible that something in this post is wrong. However, I believe it is basically as accurate as necessary in regards to the Scratch website in particular.

That's really helpful. Thanks for the information!

Would Animation Memes be fine? I dont really want to get into any trouble with making them

As long as you give the creator of the material credit, it should be fine.