Leaderboards and speedrun.com's new terms of service

We heard feedback about the missing CC license clause from our TOS when we recently updated it for other compliance needs. It’s since been added back in, and we appreciate the community bringing it to our attention.

To clarify Speedrun.com’s stance on the topic, we strongly believe in SR.C as an open platform for use by communities, and we have no interest in restricting access to any runs or community resources. We see it as our job to keep this information available online forever.

We believe runs are the property of their owners, and by submitting a run you agree to make it accessible to the public under the CC license. We apologize if there was any confusion around that in our recent update.

Five years later, the licence is gone again, and the terms now ban anyone from archiving those runs.

Speedrun.com released a news post, where they marked some of the changes to the terms. The AI-bot changes are fantastic. But they come paired with many harmful and destructive changes. Many of these are not mentioned in the new post, but are absolutely there in the terms and conditions. They don’t mention the fact that donations are now marked as commercial, that competitors are not allowed to use their api anymore, that you cannot even manually copy runs anymore, that you are now as a moderator liable for guest runs you import, that your content can stay on the site now even if you delete your account, and much more.

They mention you can ask for permission to use the data anyway. But permission you have to ask for is not the same as an open licence. It can be refused, withdrawn, and runners who quit can’t ask for anything. The news post tries to make it look like not a big deal. But man it really is a big deal.

SRC works because of the people who speedrun and moderate. This work was always shared openly, and that's how it should be. Don't lock out the community that built the place.

This isn’t legal advice. I’m just a speedrunner and community tool maintainer who has read these terms extensively, I’m not a lawyer.