Historically, use of user content on Scratch has been governed by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 2.0 license, but when Scratch's Terms of Service was updated, these license terms were removed from the document and replaced with a new license grant condition:

By Posting User Content to or via the Service, to the maximum extent of your rights to do so, including under applicable law, you hereby grant: (a) other users of the Service a non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, and create derivative works of such User Content solely for personal use within the Service and subject to these Terms; and (b) us (…). You agree to pay all monies owing to any person or entity resulting from Posting your User Content and from our exercise of the license set forth in this Section.

“User Content” is defined as such:

Certain features of the Service may permit users to submit, upload, publish, broadcast, or otherwise transmit (“Post”) content to the Service, including projects, messages, comments, forum posts, links to third party websites, photos, video or audio (including sound or voice recordings and musical recordings embodied in the video or audio), images, folders, data, text, and any other works of authorship or other works (“User Content”).

While the CC BY-SA 2.0 license isn't mentioned in the TOS, it is still mentioned in a couple FAQs in the Scratch Help Center, such as the “How can I stop people from remixing my projects?” article. Project pages still display a copyleft symbol next to the share date, implying that a copyleft license such as CC BY-SA applies, despite the contrary according to the legal document.

As far as I can tell, the TOS also does not mention attribution, which brings… other complications.


So, which license applies? Are projects still licensed under CC BY-SA and the legal team somehow forgot to mention it, or are the license terms in the process of being changed? I think this needs to be clearer because exercising rights should be simple.

If I can no longer legally use Scratch user content outside Scratch, that's fine, I just want to know for future reference.