Scratch

The reference should read like this:
MIT Media Lab - Lifelong Kindergarten Group
http://scratch.mit.edu

For referencing our documentation and other materials, I think addig somewhere that the content is under Creative Commons license would be nice too, so others know that they can copy the materials as long as they keep them under the same license.

You can take a look at how Wikipedia references photos that they have copied from flickr with Creative Commons license.

Because the scratch license permits essentially arbitrary copying, you can only legally include art or music that permits such copying.  If you have a single-user license for some art or music, it won't give you legal permission to distribute it in a scratch program.

(Given that no one is making money off of scratch, you probably won't get into any legal trouble for violating copyright using it, but theoretically, your could.)

If you want to be 100% certain that you are not breaking any copyright laws when you create a Scratch project, you should only use materials released under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License or a more permissive license such as works that are on Public Domain. 

Now, I am not a lawyer, but I think you can use anything you want on a Scratch project as long as it's for educational purposes and it doesn't take away profits from the copyright holder because it falls under what is known as Fair Use.

It would be great to hear from a copyright lawyer expert on this matters. My impression is that even law experts are still trying to figure out all these issues because the current laws are not changing as fast as technology.

Finally, if you create a  Scratch project and you don't upload it to the website I think you are free to do whatever you want.

I would like to think that the Scratch community could help in bring the laws up to date and make copyright law less obtrusive to creativity.

AlveKatt wrote:

Ah. I must admit I am a bit protective of the things I create. Not Scratch code, but stories and art. I don't mind if people take my code, but if they take my art and stories I tend to get a bit cranky... And I do want to put Stories and Art in my Scratch projekts. What if I zipped them, uploaded them to my ISP account and linked to them in the forum?

You can do that but it still does not guarantee that no one will ever copy your art and stories.

No matter how much you protect your digital creations, as soon as you share them on-line you run the risk of getting them copied. It seems to me that you should be thinking twice about sharing your creations on-lie if you are that worried.

Finally, could you edit your post and delete the "bad" word you used at the end. I don't particularly care that much about that but many people do, especially when it comes to websites for children.

Thanks!

You're right. Things are not black and white. I am so sorry if you thought I was rude! I hope you can share your art with a license that makes you feel comfortable. I love that you refer to your creations as "emotional and personal", that's exactly the kind of creations Scratch was intended to foster.

Right now the only license for Scratch projects shared on the website is Creative Commons Attributtion-ShareAlike which implies that anything can be copied as long as they give credit and share the copies with the same license. I know sites like Flickr let you choose the type of license. We didn't add that option to the Scratch website because we thought it might add a level of complexity that didn't seem necessary at the time. I will remember your concerns when thinking about licensing in the future.

Thanks a lot for sharing your concerns and I hope you continue using Scratch.

P.S. Thanks for editing your post. I know you didn't mean to offend anyone that's why I decided to wait for you to edit it.

Can I distrubute Scratch on another website? (credit will be given. I read the liscense but it just seemed like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo)

Last edited by coolstuff (2008-05-11 21:13:28)

andresmh wrote:

coolstuff: yes, as long as credit is given to the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab with a link to http://scratch.mit.edu
Thanks!

In what website do you want to put Scratch by the way?

Well, I am making a website which has tutorials, tips, example projects, and other stuff about Scratch on it. I thought it'd be great for them to download Scratch straight from my website. It's not done yet, though. I just thought I'd ask in advance.

Joren, as far as I understand it your (excellent, btw) discScratchR program produces a stand-alone executable which in turn calls a Squeak/Scratch vm with my Chirp.remix image and the presentation parameter. My Chirp image is based on the Scratch Source Code license, and - I believe and have been told - concurs with that license. You are free and certainly very welcome to use / redistribute / remix / bundle that Chirp image in your own application. Personally, I think you're doing a great job and your little menu-tool will be another wonderful addition helping to make Scratch itself yet more popular!

The source code license still provides for modification.  It is a pity that Scratch is now unfree by the standards of Debian and the FSF and the Free Content Definition.   As Bill points out, now it will not be able to be included in major linux distributions or in the freely-licensed OLPC activity-sets.

I am also curious about this shift, especially considering the CC-SA license used for all uploaded Scratch projects.

SJ

hi Andres,

I'd like to see the widest possible distribution of the current or up-to-date version of Scratch to the children of the world. This includes distribution through the OLPC and Sugar (which are no longer the same thing and Sugar is now being ported to various platforms). From my understanding this will not happen if you keep the new non commercial license since some Linux distributions will not include Scratch under that  license. Ironic voice: The Scratch team has forked Scratch by changing the license.

I don't follow why Scratch is special because it is for beginners.

It also seems to me that FLOSS has a far bigger and more influential footprint now than when Seymour Papert / LCSI went commercial with LogoWriter / MicroWorlds and you need to take that into consideration. Thanks, of course, to the hard work of FLOSS advocates.

Comparison with LOGO: Well, the versions of LOGO that are going out on OLPC / Sugar are Turtle Art (cut down, developed by Brian Silverman) and Brian Harvey's logo (powerful but non intuitive user interface last time I saw it). It's the Open Source versions which will go out to the poorest children of the world. In that sense it's very fortunate that there were forks in logo, that the commercial versions were not the only ones.

I love logo and used it for over a decade as a school teacher, mainly LogoWriter, then MicroWorlds, ie. commercial versions. Eventually I stopped using Logo because it wasn't free and another free  (but not open source) alternative came along (Game Maker) which had a great UI and a lot of appeal for many students (but not as good in terms of its deep educational philosophy). But now I have stopped using GameMaker, partly because it went commercial, and now use Scratch (which I see as a version of Logo and has the best UI yet) as my main introduction to visual programming for students. Teachers will chop and change like I have. In general they are committed to easy to use software and are not tuned in to complex legal arguments about licensing and its implications.

However, as a teacher I would like to be able to use the latest version of Scratch in Australia and use the same version if I decided to travel to a developing country to work on the OLPC project. Another hypothetical: It would also be great if African kids in refugee camps working with XO's were working on the latest version of Scratch before they came to Australia.

Another point: More and more people, teachers and youth, are using Open Source and understanding the politics of Open Source more. By changing the license as you have you diminish the enthusiasm of those people for Scratch. People chose software for a variety of reasons. The perception of support for freedom being one of those reasons.

I think we agree on the goal of the "widest possible distribution of the current or up-to-date version of Scratch to the children of the world." But we have some difference of opinion on how to achieve that goal.

The key difference, it seems, is that Scratch restricts the source-code license to non-commercial distribution. Our concern is that a company might make a slightly modified version of our source code and start selling it with a big marketing budget -- and with a different educational philosophy than our own. Such an effort could (via its marketing budget) gain much more visibility than our Scratch effort, and undermine our educational efforts with Scratch. I don't know if that's a significant risk. But we're hesitant to allow commercial distribution of variants of our source code, at least until Scratch is more firmly established in the world.

We will continue to re-evaluate our licensing policies over time, as we try to figure out the best way to help more people become engaged with Scratch and related educational ideas.

FYI: For an overview of the Scratch licenses, see http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Scratch_License (Note that there are two different licenses, one for binary and one for source.)

Mitch Resnick

doctorbeeper wrote:

mres wrote:

FYI: For an overview of the Scratch licenses, see http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Scratch_License (Note that there are two different licenses, one for binary and one for source.)

Mitch Resnick

Thank you for the link to the scratch license overview.  I managed to find this page indexed in a Google search, but wasn't able to find that link anywhere on the site.  Much appreciated.

Ditto    thanks for the link.