More than 3 years ago, Pandora started a program allowing to share people’s listening habits through Facebook. That is when Michigan filed a lawsuit against Pandora, saying that the company was infringing Michigan’s Video Rental Privacy Act and Michigan’s Consumer Act.
In response, the music service had asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to take into account the District Court Judge’s decision issued last year, saying that a class-action suit against the music-streaming service isn’t possible.

The program launched by Pandora was called “instant personalization” and allowed the service to publish Facebook users’ data without their permission. One of Michigan residents and Facebook users claimed that the music service should be held responsible for unauthorized publishing his music preferences. However, the District Court Judge decided that Pandora didn’t fall under Michigan’s privacy law, because it only streamed music and didn’t lend, rent or sell it.

The plaintiffs weren’t pleased with the decision and appealed, arguing that the District Court’s judge misinterpreted the Michigan privacy legislation by ignoring “the commonly accepted, everyday meanings of the terms “rent” and “lend”. The plaintiffs pointed out that the original judgment was in contradiction with the local lawmakers’ intention to protect consumers’ “choices in movies, music, and reading material from unwanted public disclosure”.

In response, Pandora explained that temporarily caching information on peoples’ PCs to enable streaming wasn’t “renting” or “lending” under any common definition of those terms. The company pointed out that they ask listeners only for musical preferences and then select and stream tracks containing similar musical attributes that Pandora alone controls. As such, the online music service concluded that it would be entirely novel to have a rental or borrowing arrangement where the user has no idea what tracks will be borrowed.