On 1 October 2026, speedrun.com replaced its terms of use for the first time since 2021. The old terms were a result of a large community backlash due to the removal of the so-called Creative Commons licence. Yesterday, they went ahead with the removal once again. This means the data that you own that is on speedrun.com no longer falls under Creative Commons, and the full database is now owned by Elo, speedrun.com’s parent company.
Before I begin, full disclosure: I run therun.gg, a free, ad-free speedrun stats site funded by donators on Patreon. These terms obviously affect me, and a few clauses in the new terms of use seem to be written with sites like therun in mind. Last month, I released my own version of leaderboards, and I planned to use speedrun.com data of explicitly consenting users. This is now no longer allowed. But the issue is larger than just therun. It impacts every community tool, site, bot, overlay etc that relies on speedrun.com data, and it impacts every runner and user of speedrun.com whose data lives there.
What changed
The old terms gave the community an open licence. The new terms bluntly take this away and claim ownership themselves.
| Topic | Old terms (July 2021) | New terms (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Original content licensed under CC BY‑NC 4.0User submissions through the website | No Creative Commons licence anywhere |
| Ownership of data | Company "makes no claim of ownership" over API dataOwnership of the website | Elo owns "data, data records, databases"§6(a)(ii) |
| Non-commercial use | CC definition: not primarily for money | "Commercial" includes "soliciting donations"§6(a)(i) |
| Competing projects | Not addressed | Banned from using the site for anything with "substantially similar" features§7(d) |
| Copying | Automated scraping bannedWebsite access, security and restrictions | Copying banned "manually or through bots"§7(i), §7(p) |
| API | Documented, read-only, openly licensed | Can be revised or shut off "without notice"§10 |
Does it matter?
Yeah, a lot honestly. I don’t like writing about other sites or projects, but the impact of these new terms cannot be overstated. In their news post they try to make it not a big deal, but it is. The new terms allow only “personal, non-Commercial” use, and the definition of commercial is expanded to catch pretty much every community project:
- Donations count as commercial. Fundraising and other donation tools are included. This includes a discord bot with a ko-fi link, a stats site on patreon (me), even a charity marathon. This is all outside the permitted use. A monetised YouTube video on the history of a world record, built from speedrun.com leaderboards, now needs Elo’s written permission.
- Anything "substantially similar" is banned. You’re not allowed to use speedrun.com anymore to build anything that competes with it or has similar features. Leaderboards, tracking of runs and runner profiles are the whole point of most speedrun related tools. Using src for input for these tools is all banned now. The FAQ says “the API is still there for community tools”. But pretty much all of them are excluded from these terms.
- Manual copying is banbned. You can’t even copy times over by hand and store them somewhere else anymore.
None of this data was created by Elo. Speedrunners do the runs, mods check, verify, handle them.
Runners who aren’t active anymore
Active runners are allowed to export their runs and take them anywhere. Your runs are still yours. But they are no longer publicly usable info. Moreover, any runner who is inactive or otherwise unable to export their own runs, will now live forever on one platform, under terms that forbid anyone else from archiving, preserving, importing or even manually copying these runs.
Speedrunning history should not depend on one commercial, closed-source, closed-data company’s terms of use. If speedrun.com goes rogue, shuts down, gets sold or whatever, the openly licensed copy was our safety net. That net is now completely gone.
What they said in 2021
On 10 July 2021, the day the old terms were published, speedrun.com posted this announcement on their Discord after the community pushed back on the missing licence:
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.
The news post
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.
What you can do
- Export your own runs. You can do this through your speedrun.com settings. EU and UK runners have a legal right with GDPR to receive all their data in a machine-readable format. Ask for it.
- Talk to your game’s mods. The community depends on game moderators. It must be clear that this is unacceptable. I’m not asking to switch the leaderboards to therun.gg, I don’t care about that. This is about much more. In 2021, communities paused their boards due to the backlash to similar changes. Elo updated the terms quickly after.
- Ask Elo directly. Comment under their news post, reach out to them on discord, or email them at [email protected]. Ask them to revert this change.
- Share this. The more people know about this, the better. This cannot go unseen.
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.
Sources
- speedrun.com terms of use, last updated 1 October 2026. Section numbers in this post refer to this version.
- speedrun.com terms of use, 10 July 2021 (Wayback Machine archive)
- Terms of Use update, speedrun.com’s news post and FAQ, 1 October 2026
- speedrun.com site announcement on their Discord, 10 July 2021 (screenshot above)
- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
- GDPR Article 20, the right to data portability
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.