Sony have lost an appeal in an ongoing legal squabble in the US with Yahoo! The legal wrangle related to Yahoo!'s old Launchcast service, and centred on how interactive an online music service could be under a standard webcasting licence.
In these days of Spotify and MySpace Music it all seems a bit irrelevant, but back in 2000 there was much debate over how much user-interaction an online streaming service could offer before a web provider went beyond the remit of a standard webcasting licence.
Most streaming services are now fully on-demand, but back them labels were hesitant to offer truly on-demand streaming, for any price, fearing it would hit CD and download sales. When Launchcast started to give users the option to skip tracks, the labels got nervous and subsequently went legal.
A previous court ruling said that the Launchcast service circa 2000 did not go beyond the remit of Yahoo!'s music licences, the track-skipping option being a really rather limited user-interaction device. All the majors were involved in the original litigation, but only Sony (or SonyBMG to be precise) appealed.
Last week the US appeal courts stood by the original ruling. Which is good news for Launchcast users. In 2000.