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Leaderboards and speedrun.com's new terms of servicetherun.gg

speedrun.com replaced its terms of use on 1 October 2026 and dropped the Creative Commons licence. What changed, why it matters for runners and community tools, and what you can do.

23 points•Kayvanian•about 9 hours ago•7 comments•
#speedrun#terms#leaderboards#coms#service#coms new#new terms#coms new terms

7 comments

hingler36about 8 hours ago
It's wild to me that no matter how many community-based tools are destroyed this way, this keeps happening. I understand that running servers isn't free, but there are plenty of ways to pay for infrastructure that don't destroy core community engagement.
pkilgoreabout 8 hours ago
Whoa. Does this prohibit things like Summoning Salt documentaries with the data too?
WarmWashabout 8 hours ago
The internet will be perpetually damned to this cycle as long as the expectation is for everything to be subscription free and ad-blockable/ad-free.

If your not paying for it, your opinion doesn't really matter much. You can get mad and go elsewhere, but frankly, nobody wants a crowd of people who are fundamentally opposed to compensation.

Also, just to head it off, no one donates. The stats are hilariously awful (<1% conversion) compared to the endless shower of "I always donate to things I like" comments.

ndriscollabout 8 hours ago
It's a leaderboard for a niche hobby. It looks like they have maybe a little over 1-2k users, and a little over 100k forum posts ever. It appears that the only thing that could be expensive, the video hosting, is externalized through youtube and twitch. You could run it on an old raspberry pi in a closet and never notice.
applfanboysbgonabout 8 hours ago
> It looks like they have maybe a little over 1-2k users,

speedrun.com has millions of registered runners and many more unregistered spectators. But yes, it is just a glorified UI over google sheets. Speedrun communities almost never use it for the community features like forums (Discord servers are the typical community fixtures), it is mostly just a public place to publish records. Everything on the site is provided by the community. SRC essentially adds 0 value to the community other than "it was the first aggregator, and now it's entrenched".

applfanboysbgonabout 8 hours ago
This isn't actually legal, is it? My understanding is that SRC has no claim to ownership of any of the data they received that was already licensed under Creative Commons, and cannot retroactively revoke the license?
Kayvanianabout 8 hours ago
Pre-Oct 2026 content will always be licensed under CC, they can't revoke that. The license change applies for submissions moving forward.

My understanding is that anything submitted was also dual-licensed to allow the site to freely use your content however they wish (like most sites out there that accept user content). So they can, for example, distribute the old data without the CC license statement, even if the content is CC-licensed.

gruezabout 8 hours ago
At least in the US, whether the data they received can be copyrighted at all is questionable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Ass%27n_v.....

nosrepaabout 1 hour ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Ass%27n_v%...

Relinked for those of us who have apps that don't parse that url due to the trailing period.

ZeWakaabout 8 hours ago
CC specifically says it's non-revocable unlike many licenses, yes.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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