License to play
Give credit and share
Imagine that each Scratch project is a cake, a very special cake that comes with its recipe (programming blocks). All members of the Scratch community share their cakes along with their recipes. This means that you can enjoy the cakes and learn how to make them yourself!
There are no secret recipes: the instructions on how to make these cakes are open for anyone to use, reuse, modify, and serve as inspiration for new ideas... I mean cakes.
You can eat the cakes as well as copy other people's recipes to make your own, maybe with different ingredients. This freedom comes with two simple requirements:
- share your cakes along with the recipes
- give credit to those who inspired you
Some people gave a name to this type of sharing: they call it Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. In setting up the Scratch community, we decided to adopt this approach since we believe that it supports learning and creativity within the community. By sharing recipes and ingredients (scripts and artwork), people can build upon one another’s ideas and everyone will benefit.
In designing the Scratch website, we included features to encourage people to share and to give credit to others. On each project page, you can always download the original scripts for the project. If you remix a project (modifying the scripts or artwork, and sharing the result), the new project will include a note saying it is based on someone else’s project. In addition, we encourage you to give credit in the Project Notes, mentioning the people and projects that inspired you.
For the more technically inclined: you might find it interesting that each Scratch project page comes with embedded RDF metadata that sets the license of the project as well as other properties. We actually based our RDF on the one Flickr uses but changed it so it represents the content as "InteractiveResource".
Learn more about the Terms of Use of the Scratch online community and the Creative Commons initiative.
Scratch Team
MIT Media Lab
