I believe I have the right to choose whenever possible which resources my computer downloads and what code my computer executes. That includes selecting which parts of a specific website or application I download and execute.

If Spotify wants to refuse to fulfill requests for one resource (e.g. songs) separate from requests for another resource (e.g. ads), I have absolutely no problem with that. But if Spotify chooses (as appears to be the case, at least before this account suspension policy) to fulfill both requests independent of one another, I believe I have the right to make either request, both requests, or neither request.

In other words, I have absolutely no qualms with users using ad blocking software, just like I have no problem with users using firewalls, antivirus software, or content restriction software. And I also have no problem with Spotify attempting to prevent this activity, either by making ad blocking technically infeasible (radio figured this out over 100 years ago), or by suspending accounts that violate their terms (especially free accounts, since the customer would have no case that Spotify owes them a refund or compensation).

You get married.

The agreement between you and your significant other is that both parties will be faithful and to perform various duties within the relationship. Also, if the marriage is ended, both parties leave with their individual things/pay/etc.

You decide to play the field. Your significant other decides to leave you and you are now responsible for the tasks/financials that your significant other previously assisted with.

In agreements, you can't pick and choose the terms of the agreement you're willing to subject yourself to once they're settled (beyond renegotiating). In the Spotify case, they literally get nothing out of the arrangement if someone blocks their ads on the free tier whereas the person blocking said ads would be of the belief they're owed limitless listening to free music? That's pretty comical.

>once they're settled...

Should I be expected to monitor changes to a living document that I never read in the first place in order to know whether the current version means I am married to Spotify and act accordingly?

Spotify is the one who defaulted first by not providing me the limitless free music I am owed.

If the terms change, they contact you that they changed. At that point, yeah, you’re bound by new terms if you continue using the service. That’s kind of been the way things have been since the advent of Internet services in general.

I’m curious how you’re certain they defaulted first when you state that you never read the document in the first place.

>I’m curious how you’re certain they defaulted.

I'm sorry that was sarcasm. I didn't make any assumptions I just clicked the box or button or whatever.

Do they contact you? Most terms of service just say 'revisit here constantly in case we changed something'

I used Spotify during a Sprint promo (when they were my carrier way back when). At one point, I received an email stating that an update to the terms was made. I imagine they still do this, but I guess they could just as easily have stopped, not certain.

A lot of services that I’ve signed up with will announce new terms either via email (quick search of my email lists the most recent ones as Papa Johns, PlayStation, Disney Movie Rewards, Skype, Gamestop) or on next launch of app (Blizzard and Steam being prominent ones off the top of my head). I don’t know many that announce they will in advance though (ie at sign up saying they’ll communicate changes to you), so probably better to be proactive than reactive? I don’t know.

>> Also, if the marriage is ended, both parties leave with their individual things/pay/etc...

Q: Would Spotify refund users that they ban?

Sure they would. The $0 the user spent on the service.

Refund them what? They're not paying anything.

Can you point to the part of the Spotify ToC, where you agree not to block ads? I haven't been able to find anything about it.

You agree that they can serve them to you. Blocking them kind of stops that, yeah?

8 Rights you grant us

In consideration for the rights granted to you under the Agreements, you grant us the right (1) to allow the Spotify Service to use the processor, bandwidth, and storage hardware on your Device in order to facilitate the operation of the Service, (2) to provide advertising and other information to you, and (3) to allow our business partners to do the same. In any part of the Spotify Service, the Content you access, including its selection and placement, may be influenced by commercial considerations, including Spotify’s agreements with third parties. Some Content licensed by, provided to, created by or otherwise made available by Spotify (e.g. podcasts) may contain advertising as part of the Content. The Spotify Service makes such Content available to you unmodified.

Granting Spotify rights means that the user allow them to show them ads. It's in there to protect Spotify. A user agrees not to sue them, if Spotify put ads on their phone.

It has nothing to do with whatever the user does to avoid being exposed to those ads.

That’s a very interesting take. What prior legal action justifies it?

This seems more akin to cable services here. For all intents and purposes, all of the channels they provide are served to the home, but they then restrict based off the package you’re paying for. In Spotify’s case instead of restricting (unless they have premium only channels/content), they’re adding advertisements. To block the ads is analogous to using a method to remove the restriction on channels you can access, and the typical remedy is to terminate the service to that customer and/or seeking civil remedies.

I don't know if that's an interesting take. That's what it means. I'm unaware if there's any prior legal actions but terms are written not only for any prior legal actions but also for any possible legal actions.

An analogy to cable services would be if you had something installed on your TV that automatically switched channel or put on a cat youtube video, when the commercials are on on and switched back when the commercials were done.

Your example would be an analogy to having a script on Spotify which gave you access to some premium music library that only paying customers should have access to.

Okay, how about this: it’d be like granting an entity (Spotify) the ability to put signs (advertisements) in your yard (browser window), and then when they go to do so, you prevent them from entering your yard (browser window).

If it isn’t against the agreement directly, it certainly is against the spirit of it. And that holds a lot of weight. Because what is the point of being able to show you advertisements if you’re going to block them from even rendering?

I get it. I don’t like ads either. Well, I’m generally fine if they make some degree of sense (none of the odd ones where it has a picture of an onion partially covered by a sock or something) or don’t hijack the browser (massive redirect that eats back history and presents me with some “congratulations, click here” thing). But if I don’t like the ads, I’m free to either pay for Spotify without advertisements or not use Spotify at all. No one is holding a gun to my head that I must have them (and I don’t after a promo period with Sprint) and they do have to pay licensing for that music (to include some kind of fee per x streams of given songs to ASCAP or whatever). That doesn’t even factor in the infrastructure requirements on their end. So why would anyone expect this to be totally free to a user?

Section 9.10

> circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service

This is not included in the terms I see (it redirects to specific terms for my country https://www.spotify.com/dk/legal/end-user-agreement/#s9)

However if I change the country id to "us" I get the same version as you, and I can see this new section 9.10.

If I google the new text, I find articles from yesterday about Spotify changing their terms in order to ban users using adblockers. So it appears that up until now, users has not had any agreement with Spotify that they will not block or circumvent ads.

I guess they are changing them incrementally. The terms changed for the UK last week (there seemingly was little interest from anyone). Unless there's something special in Danish law I'd expect yours to be updated soon.

Maybe not spelled out as such, but in section 8 under rights a user provides to Spotify, the ability to serve ads to you is there.

At least in the US terms. No idea for other countries.

See my other other answer about that. It's not relevant in this context.

> You don't have a right to use Spotify how you want.

Of course they have that right. Spotify has no right to restrict how anyone uses their service.

In fact they do have the right to restrict how people use their service.

They're about to trivially prove that exact point by terminating accounts that use ad blockers.

Ability != right

They have both.

But I still have right to NOT use service provided by Spotify or and another third-party service, completely or partially.

You do NOT have a right to use the service "partially" (by blocking ads), as blocking ads on their free plan is against the ToS.

ToS's (online, at least) aren't legally enforceable. If they were actually legally binding companies would be sueing users for violating them all the time. Theres a reason the extent of ToS enforcement is just account closure, its because they have no legal standing and just act as a safeguard against actual legal challenges.

My only point is that you don't have a "right" to use the service. The ToS not being legally enforceable does not change that fact. Spotify can kick you off for violating their terms, but they can also kick you off for whatever they want.

Being barred from the service is not some sort of injustice or violation of your rights, especially after breaking the terms.

The people in this thread claiming they can do whatever they want and block ads is true. That does not give them some sort of moral high ground, just because they can.

You would be absolutely incorrect. I've received scores of C&D's over the years, which I've always complied with, and seen several people get sued and lose with penalties being both criminal and financial.

I would say it's unlikely that Spotify would even send a C&D to an adblocking user, but the folks that make their own apps to bypass the advertising or rip the streams are at legal risk.

The legal enforceability of the TOS isn't really important here, when you use a service there are conditions with that service. Go ahead and try walking into starbucks, paying for half of a tall americano and walking out the door with half of a tall americano. Service providers have the inherent right to place conditions and limits on the services they provide.

>Go ahead and try walking into starbucks, paying for half of a tall americano and walking out the door with half of a tall americano.

I have watched people do exactly this as well as many variations on this theme...at Starbucks.

Did they succeed? I've seen a man with mental health issues walk in an order a coffee normally, paying money for the coffee, then start ranting while waiting for it to be made and end up being led off by the police because he was getting uncomfortably aggressive. There are conditions for service outside of the absolutely obvious ones.

Yeah...I dunno maybe the baristas are more accomodating at the one I go to but they're usually pretty happy to make things like that and charge less for it.

If you look at starbuck's prices you'll see some drink x being sold as a Venti - 5$, Grande - 4.25$, Tall - 4$, for a while this really annoyed my brain since a Venti is 2x a Tall (or so) so the low price difference makes it silly not to just get a Venti half as often. In actuality the price of what you're buying is contributed to very minorly by the ingredients and much more by the labour and that 4$ might be as close to the floor as starbucks is willing to go. That's a bit interesting and different...

Additionally, good on your baristas for being flexible, though the corporate office might object and come down on them if they found they were offering this, as they're either losing money or making less money serving you then they'd make if they served a different customer - so the time to make your drink would be particularly economically suboptimal.

Anyways, these are mostly fiddly points and my original comment was less about the fact that businesses always did things like this... and more about the fact that they do have the right to refuse. If you go in one day and a different barista is behind the machine, they may refuse your request and so it goes - alternatively maybe your usual barista got a talking to from management and can't do it any more. Either of these cases work, declining partial service is an option for a business... in fact, declining normal service is also usually an option, maybe you're going to a ramen place that's open until 7 and arrive well before, but the owner has a headache and is closing up at 5:30 when you walk in - you're not _owed_ service.

The only exception to this is cases where people have historically been terrible and the government has specifically stepped in, if you were black and starbucks refused to serve you after serving a white customer and before serving another white customer then the onus would be on them to rationalize why they refused service (and they'd probably end up paying a hefty fine or being targeted by a lawsuit).

Oh I agree with that. I was just pointing out the example itself doesn't work so well. I do understand that it's not necessarily store policy, but comes down to the choices of specific employees. This is why i think it's a poor example. With spotify you'll never have a situation where an individual employee can make the decision to allow someone to say use an adblocker or something.

In a lot of ways you can't really compare it to real world examples, because even within corporate chains individual employees can just say fuck it and choose to give the customer a discount or a custom order or allow something they shouldn't.

With an online business like Spotify that utilizes algorithms and automatic actions, this is unlikely to ever happen.

Having worked in a few customer service jobs, or hell even now where I work now, you'd be surprised what customers think they're owed vs what they actually are and how often they do end up getting their way.

In some ways maybe it's because of this people take this mentality onto the web and expect to be able to do the same things.

The real world usually ends up being a lot more grey than the black and white of the legalese and terms and conditions of the internet.

Sales have very specific laws. When you buy a coffee you are entering in a contract.

Walking in a Starbucks and using the free WiFi without buying anything is a better example.

Right, and Starbucks should feel perfectly at ease kicking you out for that, just as Spotify plans to do.

(actually Starbucks does not feel at ease doing that after the whole two men / racism fiasco, but they should feel justified in doing that).

Oh, I agree they can kick you out. But getting a coffee and walking away is very different from using the WiFi and walking away.

Not really, you're using a service, the cost of that service may be incidental but the classic superman/office space bank hack of diverting all the partial cents on interest to a separate account isn't legal just because each action is so small... It is different because it'd probably be silly to enforce that everyone using their wifi has paid for a drink, but there isn't a distinction there ethically or legally... Unless you think that wifi should be a free social benefit for everyone everywhere - but that particular wifi is being provided by starbucks for a cost to them.

I just think it would be very hard to legally argue that there is any implied contract that you must buy a coffee to use the WiFi. But then again, IANAL.

There is a literal contract for Sbux wifi. You need to agree to a ToS when you join the wifi network. That ToS includes "you must be a starbucks customer".

Obviously what a "customer" entails is up for legal debate, but it generally does not include people who purchase nothing from Sbux.

IMHO, the more correct analogy will be to walk into cinema and watch cinema without paying for pop-corn, despite the fact that theater makes most of their profit on pop-corn.

I have no obligation to make a business profitable.

If the ticket price was bumped up by $20 and popcorn was included free you might rationally object to the fact that you didn't want their overpriced air anyways, but it doesn't mean you'd have any inherent right to utilize the service at the old cost - competition might fix that problem (a new theatre with slightly more expensive tickets than the old one originally offered, but far cheaper than the new tickets to movie + popcorn) or regulation might (especially if movie theatres don't scale well (and they don't, a mall with 20 movie theatres isn't going to be rolling in money)).

Customers who use too many company resources or hurt the bottom line get dropped. Like when a suspected card counter is banned from a casino. That's just what's happening here.

>> I have no obligation to make a business profitable.

Do we have an obligation to allow script in our browsers? >90% of my "news reading" on the internet is done with NoScript running; from my point of view it's all good, no ads, no GDPR pop-ups, pages load quickly, fewer worries about tracking.

It's probably not what publishers want, though.

That's where the question gets interesting! Your browser definitely (under current laws) has the right to refuse to allow NoScript to run, so if a similar program specifically targeted google ads then chrome would not be obligated to support it and could use the laws around your legal right (and lack thereof) to proprietary modify software to order you to cease & desist running it.

I think that websites do, legally, have the right to refuse you service if you run NoScript and some websites go through crazy hoop to exercise that right. I _suspect_ that using NoScript to alter the page is actually illegal under current intent since that usage could cause the software to misperform and potentially cause damages and it violates the agreed upon usage contract on that site. That said, it's _mostly_ unenforceable on a technical level (usually it's at least not cost effective to do) and I personally think it's unethical to force people to run malware to view your content - it needs a clearer definition in the law though, all this stuff is stupid hazy.

>> I _suspect_ that using NoScript to alter the page is actually illegal under current intent ...

Yet some would say the pages get altered by the scripts that stuff in the awful ads

In any case, you don't need an add-in to disable scripting. Hell, use curl to fetch the damned page. That's about as "pure" a way of fetching one as you can get.

The day they rule that curl is illegally blocking ads is the day I become a monk.

I interact a lot with ads on eBay and similar sites. I even subscribe to them! Moreover, I also like ads at Facebook news feed, because they are relevant and delivered at time. I unlike but click sometimes at ads in Google. Everything else is banned with NoScript.

IMHO, ad-driven business model is OK, but implementation matters. If site will _serve_ me with ads, I will use it. If site will try to abuse me with ads, then I will try to shield me from this abuse.

I have ideas how to solve Spotify problems, but it looks like Spotify employee are downvoting opponent comments to death, so they will have my f*ck instead of hint.

Spotify does NOT have the right to run arbitrary code on my device. That is not something that fits into the category of me using their service. That rather fits into the category of me being forced to provide a service to Spotify.

Spotify isn't reaching into your computer and running ads, you are running Spotify. If you don't want Spotify and its dependencies, you can simply not run Spotify.

The ads weren't a dependency, and technically speaking, still aren't.

They could force them to be. And socially, are. But, they're not technically.

I'm not sure why a "technical" dependency matters. A shirt at a shopping mall doesn't "technically" need a security tag, but it's not my prerogative to remove it.

How is blocking ads with software different from turning down the volume during commercials?

Also, nobody can be forced to listen to something.

There isn't a difference, except that Spotify can drop you as a customer. Which is what they're doing. Which is fine.

The debate in this thread is not "what can you technically do?", but rather "who has the moral high ground?"

It is my private property (my screen). I absolutely do have the right to use it partially if Spotify is emitting it freely. Their terms of service have utterly no relevance to what I disallow to be shown on my private property.

Ok so they'll ban you and then... what? You'll have no recourse, i.e., you have no inherent right to use their service as you see fit (outside your own head anyway).

I’ll use technology to legally circumvent the ban, as has been happening since the dawn of the fool’s errand that is DRM or free channel restriction.

He has all the right to, that's why he's not in prison.

Spotify gets to dictate who gets to use their product though.

> If you don't want to "subject yourself to personal harm" you can either not use the service or pay for the ad-free service.

OR, he could install an ad blocker. It is completely legal to use ad blockers. Thats the law. If you don't like the law, then go change it.