It's no stealing, it's not even lying. Show me where in the agreement it says exactly "you must to listen to ads from a third-party if you listen to music". There are things like "we retain the right to...", or "by using this service, you agree to allow us to...". There are no commandments, only stuff that covers their ass so you can't sue them for closing your account, exposing your personal information or letting other people hack your devices.
Stealing is taking property with the intention of permanently depriving the rightful owner of said property.
One cannot steal data by not watching ads because you can't deprive the owner of said data. Misusing a word to evoke an emotional response is intellectually dishonest and manipulative. Entitled is another overused manipulative term.
I am in fact entitled to decide what runs on my computer and spotify is entitled to decide who accesses theirs. If spotify closes accounts for not watching ads and I choose to block ads literally nobody is in the wrong. We are both exercising our respective rights.
At that point it becomes a discussion on what is prudent.
If you arne't in the habit of reading 5-10 pages of legalese when you walk into random stores I wonder why you believe people will read 5-10 pages of legalese before reading the dozens of sites they visit. People care about the terms and conditions exactly when they are informed of being in breach of them and only to the extent that being in breach of them effects their life.
In this case it seems incredibly likely that said users who aren't customers in the first place even if some of them watch ads will just watch free music on youtube.
On net spotify will save money on bandwidth which is incredibly cheap to start with, gain a modicum of new subscribers, and shrink their supply of free users that are their primary source of paid users.
Presumably they are in the best position to figure out if this is worth it and we shall all see.
> Stealing is taking property with the intention of permanently depriving the rightful owner of said property.
> One cannot steal data by not watching ads because you can't deprive the owner of said data.
Well, it is. Spotify grants you the temporary license to play the copyrighted song for you listening to their ads. They _pay_ for the right to distribute that song. It's like taking something from a store and refusing to pay for it because "that store does not decide where my money goes".
> I am in fact entitled to decide what runs on my computer and spotify is entitled to decide who accesses theirs. If spotify closes accounts for not watching ads and I choose to block ads literally nobody is in the wrong. We are both exercising our respective rights.
Fully agreed.
> On net spotify will save money on bandwidth which is incredibly cheap to start with, gain a modicum of new subscribers, and shrink their supply of free users that are their primary source of paid users.
Well, as said above, they pay licensing fees and that is actually most of their business cost. I highly doubt that they loose many customers who would bring in any money with this move.
Stealing is a term of art for the legal arena. Just like a million idiots who call their entire tower a cpu doesn't serve to redefine a technical term you "feeling" like not watching ads is stealing food from your mouth doesn't mean that it is.
There are a number of pieces of actual property involved but the user isn't carting off Spotify's servers and spotify isn't breaking into the users home and stealing their laptops.
What you do want to cart of is the users autonomy to manage how their actual property is used in service to an imaginary moral duty to be brainwashed by propoganda based on terms and conditions that we don't agree are a moral obligation.
You have a moral right to the actual money your users have agreed to pay you if you provide the agreed upon service.
The fact that you actually believe that you can buy their thoughts, their autonomy, their attention, and their time with your cheap crap doesn't mean if they opt not to give you those things you have been stolen from because those things were never for sale and you can't own them.
The best you can do is not do business if you feel like the deal isn't mutually beneficial. Take your ball and go home if you like but don't be dumb enough to call your users thieves for claiming unalienable rights to their own brains and machines.
> a: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
Using Spotify without paying them, either directly or by watching ads, falls under that definition. The fact that there is no actual object being taken does not impact this.
If you create a great piece of software and I copy and then sell it, would you not consider it stealing? After all, you still have your copy.
Or, if a client contracts you to configure his network and then refuses to pay, is that not stealing your work? After all, you just used knowledge and time. Nothing stolen here, you still have your knowledge and you can surely make a copy of the configuration files :)
> The fact that you actually believe that you can buy their thoughts, their autonomy, their attention, and their time with your cheap crap doesn't mean if they opt not to give you those things you have been stolen from because those things were never for sale and you can't own them.
I don't believe you can buy their thoughts and I don't think Spotify attempts to. But you can definitely buy their time. That's exactly what you sell when you're employed.
> The best you can do is not do business if you feel like the deal isn't mutually beneficial. Take your ball and go home if you like but don't be dumb enough to call your users thieves for claiming unalienable rights to their own brains and machines.
Again, I totally agree. I would not use Spotify with Ads either. But if I'm not willing to fulfill my side of the deal, be it paying with time or money, I'm in no way entitled to their service.
"But you can definitely buy their time. That's exactly what you sell when you're employed."
The relationship you have with your employees is the inverse of the relationship you have with your users. I think you don't understand the idea of entitlement anymore than stealing.
They aren't entitled to spotify if spotify doesn't want to do business with them but they are entitled to have a negative opinion about spotify and or spotify's actions.
The fact that an increasing share of spotify's users neither want to pay them or watch their ads is a failure on Spotify's part to capture those potential users and reliance on a business model that is fundamentally stupid.
The fact that ad supported multimedia worked for so long is not an indication of future longevity. Horses were a great method of transportation for longer.
Section 8 grants Spotify and their business partners the right to provide advertising and other information to you. That's you granting them rights should they succeed in doing so, not you guaranteeing the ability to do it.
Section 9, item 5 only mentions "circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service". Nothing about "third party" ads, when "third party" is explicitly mentioned in other rules, separate from "the Spotify Service". If they legally can, I'm sure they'll "fix" that wording, at which point using a typical ad blocker with become lying, but still definitely not stealing. That rule is redundant anyway as it would required circumventing DRM, already illegal.
I guess there are plenty of "commandments" there, but they're all for show as they're either already illegal or fall under the fact that Spotify can deactivate your account whenever they want, even for reasons not listed there.
It only allows them to TRY to provide ads to me, according to particular web requests, etc. It does not mean I am compelled to allow it to be displayed on the screen I own, regardless of whether I consuming from the free content stream they decided to emit.
I could cut out a small rectangle of construction paper and create a robot with a computer vision apparatus, and have it follow me around, constantly check if an ad is visible on the screen, and dynamically block my field of vision to ensure I don’t see it.
Or I could miniaturize that whole thing and place it as a browser plugin or mobile app.
I’m frankly surprised you believe terms of service regarding a data stream that a company chooses to freely emit are in any way related whatsoever to a person’s right to restrict what is displayed on a physical device that they own.
My screen is not Spotify’s property. They are allowed to TRY to display something on it, and it will only be displayed IF I LET THEM. There’s no discussion here.
>My screen is not Spotify’s property. They are allowed to TRY to display something on it, and it will only be displayed IF I LET THEM. There’s no discussion here
And they will only send you that stream IF YOU LET THEM (display ads). That's the deal whether or not you like it. You don't get to substitute your own.
Nobody is “using the service in any way you like” at all. Preventing some certain pixels for being allowed to be displayed on a piece of my personal property has no connection, legal or otherwise, to usage of some freely emitted data stream someone else decided to send out freely to the world.
The person who sends it out to the world might write some things down or complain about what they want to control on my personal property, but it is just not relevant to anything. They are free to stop producing a freely available data stream if they don’t want to. Just like I am free to keep blocking certain infos they try to send me (ads).
We emphatically don't agree. I believe the user and spotify have the right to do whatever they like with their property. Spotify having the right to discontinue doing business doesn't indicate that the user didn't have the right to control their own property in the first place.
