Terms of Use

About these terms

Carbon is an independent project by pealz. In these terms, “Carbon”, “we” and “us” mean that project and the person who runs it, and “you” means the person using it. You can reach us at support@getcarbon.cc.

These terms cover everything we operate, which we call the “Services”:

• the official Carbon desktop app for Windows, including the builds and updates we publish;
• the website at getcarbon.cc;
• Carbon accounts and the account service at api.getcarbon.cc;
• Carbon+, our optional paid upgrade, once it is available.

By creating an account or using the Services, you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the Services.

Carbon and Spotify

Carbon is a third-party client for Spotify. It is not made, endorsed, sponsored or supported by Spotify, and Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.

• Playing music in Carbon requires a Spotify Premium account. Your Spotify account, subscription and content are governed by Spotify’s own terms and privacy policy, not by ours.
• Carbon connects to Spotify through a developer app that you create and own, using your own Client ID. You are responsible for following Spotify’s developer terms for that app.
• Spotify decides what its platform allows. If Spotify changes, limits or withdraws the features Carbon relies on, parts of Carbon may stop working, and we cannot promise a fix.

Who can use Carbon

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Services. If the law where you live sets a higher minimum age for agreeing to online services on your own, you must meet that age.

If you are under 18, or under the age of majority where you live, you may use the Services only with the consent of a parent or legal guardian, who agrees to these terms on your behalf and is responsible for your use, including any purchases.

You may not use the Services if the law prohibits you from doing so, or if we have previously closed your account for breaking these terms.

Your Carbon account

A Carbon account uses your email address and a password. Once accounts launch, you will need a free account to use the Carbon app.

How sign-in works

• We confirm your email address with a one-time code when you sign up.
• Each time you sign in, we email you a second one-time code. This two-step check is always on.
• You can generate backup codes to use if you cannot reach your email. Each backup code works once. Store them somewhere safe; we show them only once.

Your responsibilities

• Give a real email address that you control, and keep it up to date.
• Keep your password, sign-in codes and backup codes confidential. Do not share your account or let anyone else use it.
• You are responsible for activity on your account unless it happened because of our own failure to protect it.
• If you think someone else has access to your account, change your password, sign out your other sessions from your account page, and tell us at support@getcarbon.cc.

Accounts are personal. You may not sell, transfer or rent an account, or create accounts by automated means.

Carbon+ and refunds

Carbon+ is an optional, one-time purchase that unlocks extra features and supports development. The core Carbon app stays free. Carbon+ is not available yet; this section applies once it is.

Price and payment

• The price is shown before you buy, and you pay it once. Carbon+ is not a subscription and does not renew.
• Payments are handled by a payment provider we name at checkout. We do not receive or store your full card details.
• Prices may include or exclude taxes depending on where you live; checkout shows which.

What you get

Carbon+ gives your account a personal, non-transferable license to use the Carbon+ features for as long as we offer them. We may improve or change individual features over time. If we ever stop offering Carbon+ entirely within 12 months of your purchase, we will refund what you paid.

Refunds

If Carbon+ is not right for you, email support@getcarbon.cc from your account’s email address within 14 days of purchase and we will refund you in full. We may decline a refund if the purchase has been used substantially, for example if you ask for a refund after repeated purchases and refunds, or after your account was closed for breaking these terms. Refunds go back to the original payment method.

If the law where you live gives you stronger rights, such as a right to withdraw from a digital purchase, those rights apply in addition to this policy. Please contact us before filing a chargeback so we can sort it out directly.

Acceptable use

Use Carbon to listen to music you are entitled to listen to. When using the Services, you agree not to:

• break any law, or help anyone else do so;
• download, record, rip or redistribute music or other content from Spotify, or get around any protection that Spotify or rights holders use;
• use Carbon in a way that breaks Spotify’s terms or developer policies;
• probe, scan, overload or attack the Services, or bypass rate limits, verification or other security measures;
• access accounts or data that are not yours, or try to guess passwords or codes;
• impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your connection to Carbon;
• send spam or abusive messages through any feature of the Services, including our emails;
• resell access to the Services or use them to build a competing hosted service without our permission.

Reading, building and modifying the open-source app code is welcome and is not a breach of these terms; see the next section.

Open-source code

The source code of the Carbon desktop app is published on GitHub under the MIT license. Your rights to use, copy, modify and distribute that code come from the MIT license, and nothing in these terms limits them.

These terms cover the Services we run: accounts, the account service, the website, Carbon+ and the official builds and updates we publish. If you run a modified or third-party build of Carbon, we are not responsible for it, and connecting it to Carbon accounts is still subject to these terms.

The MIT license covers code, not our name or logo. See the next section.

Our name, logo and content

The Carbon name, the Carbon logo and the design and text of this website belong to us. You may refer to Carbon by name to describe it accurately, but you may not use the name or logo in a way that suggests a modified build, another product or a service is official or endorsed by us.

Subject to these terms, we give you a personal, revocable, non-exclusive license to use the Services for your own, non-commercial listening.

If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them without owing you anything. We are grateful for them all the same.

Third-party services

Carbon works with services run by other companies. Each has its own terms, and we are not responsible for their availability, content or practices.

Spotify

Music, your library and playback. Requires Premium.

Discord

Shows what you are playing on your profile while the Discord desktop app is running.

Last.fm

Records what you play, only if you connect your Last.fm account.

LRCLIB

Supplies time-synced lyrics, which are provided by its community and may contain mistakes.

GitHub

Hosts our source code, releases and update files.

Cloudflare

Hosts the website and the account service.

Resend

Delivers our account emails, such as sign-in codes.

The Privacy Policy explains what information each of them receives.

Copyright and DMCA notices

We respect intellectual property and expect our users to do the same. Carbon does not host music; it plays content from Spotify, and lyrics come from LRCLIB.

If you believe something on the Services infringes your copyright, send a notice to support@getcarbon.cc with the subject “DMCA notice”, including:

1. your physical or electronic signature;
2. a description of the copyrighted work you believe is infringed;
3. where the material is on the Services, specific enough for us to find it;
4. your name, address, telephone number and email address;
5. a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent or the law;
6. a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner.

If material you provided was removed and you believe that was a mistake, you may send a counter-notice to the same address with your signature, the material and where it was, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe it was removed by mistake or misidentification, your contact details, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal courts for your address (or, if you are outside the United States, any judicial district in which we may be found). We close the accounts of repeat infringers where appropriate.

Lyrics shown in Carbon are fetched from LRCLIB. You can also raise lyrics concerns with LRCLIB directly.

Updates and changes to Carbon

The Carbon app checks for updates and installs them after verifying their signature, so you stay on a supported version. Some fixes, including security fixes, may require you to update before you can keep using an account.

Carbon is actively developed. We may add, change or remove features, and we may offer early or experimental features that are less reliable than the rest of the app. We may also suspend or end any part of the Services; where reasonable, we will give notice first.

Suspension and termination

You can stop using Carbon at any time and delete your account from your account page. Deleting your account removes your account data as described in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or close your account, or limit access to the Services, if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if we must do so by law, or if your use creates a risk to other users, to us or to the Services. Where it is safe and lawful, we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond. If we close your account without cause, we will refund any Carbon+ purchase made in the previous 12 months.

When your account ends, your license to use the account-based Services ends too. The sections on open-source code, our content, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity, resolving disputes, governing law and general terms continue to apply.

Disclaimers

To the fullest extent the law allows, the Services are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.

We work hard to keep Carbon reliable and secure, but we do not promise that the Services will be uninterrupted, error-free or always compatible with Spotify, Windows or the third-party services listed above, or that lyrics and other third-party content will be accurate. Some places do not allow these exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Carbon will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, goodwill or use, arising from or related to the Services, even if we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the Services is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose and US$50.

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited by law, such as liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence where that rule applies.

Indemnity

If you break these terms or the law while using the Services, and someone brings a claim against us as a result, you agree to cover the reasonable costs, losses and legal fees we incur in responding to it. We will tell you about the claim promptly and let you take part in the response. This does not apply where the law does not allow it, or where the claim was caused by our own conduct.

Resolving disputes

Please read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights.

Talk to us first

Most problems can be solved quickly. Before starting any formal proceeding, email support@getcarbon.cc with your name, your account email, a description of the problem and what you want. We will do the same if we have a dispute with you. If we cannot resolve it within 60 days, either of us may start arbitration or, where allowed below, go to small claims court.

Binding individual arbitration

Except as described below, you and Carbon agree that any dispute, claim or controversy arising out of or relating to these terms or the Services will be resolved by binding arbitration on an individual basis, not in court. The arbitration will be administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules then in effect, which are available at adr.org. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this agreement to arbitrate.

• The arbitrator may award the same individual relief a court could, but only for the individual claimant.
• Hearings may take place by video or phone, or in the county where you live.
• Filing and arbitrator fees are paid as the AAA Consumer Rules provide. If those rules would make you pay more than a court filing fee, we will pay the difference.

Exceptions

• Either of us may bring an individual claim in small claims court if it qualifies there and stays there.
• Either of us may go to court to stop infringement or misuse of intellectual property.

Class action and jury trial waiver

You and Carbon may bring claims against each other only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated or representative proceeding. You and Carbon each waive the right to a trial by jury.

If this class action waiver is found unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim must be decided by a court, not in arbitration, and the rest of this section still applies to other claims.

Your right to opt out

You can opt out of this agreement to arbitrate within 30 days of first accepting these terms. Email support@getcarbon.cc with the subject “Arbitration opt-out”, your name and the email address of your Carbon account, and a clear statement that you opt out of arbitration. Opting out does not affect any other part of these terms.

Governing law

These terms and any dispute relating to them are governed by the laws of the State of California, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and by the Federal Arbitration Act for the arbitration agreement above. For any claim that is not arbitrated, you and Carbon agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in California.

If you live outside the United States, you may also have the benefit of mandatory consumer protection laws where you live, which these terms do not override.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as Carbon changes or the law requires. We will post the new version here and update the date at the top. If a change materially affects your rights, we will tell you by email or in the app at least 14 days before it takes effect, unless the change is needed sooner for legal or security reasons.

If you keep using the Services after a change takes effect, the new terms apply. If you do not agree, stop using the Services and delete your account. Changes to the dispute section do not apply to disputes we already knew about before the change.

General terms

• Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and Carbon about the Services. The MIT license separately governs the app’s source code.
• Severability. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect, and the unenforceable part is applied as fully as the law allows.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a right right away, we have not given it up.
• Assignment. You may not transfer these terms or your account. We may transfer them as part of a reorganization or a transfer of the project, as long as your rights under them are not reduced.
• Events outside our control. We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by events we cannot reasonably control, including outages at Spotify or our providers.
• Notices. We send notices to your account email address. You can send notices to support@getcarbon.cc.
• Headings. Headings are for convenience and do not change the meaning of these terms.

Contact

Questions about these terms? Email support@getcarbon.cc. For bugs and feature ideas, open an issue on GitHub.