Three years ago, specifically on April 2010, Pandora launched a program that is capable of sharing people’s listening habits via Facebook. In response, residents of Michigan filed suit against the service (on the 20th of September 2010), claiming that the music service is violating Michigan’s Video Rental Privacy Act, as well as Michigan’s Consumer Act.

In response to these allegations, Pandora had asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to stick with the District Court Judge’s decision (which was issued last year), ruling that a class-action lawsuit against the music-streaming service is not possible.

The aforementioned program, called “instant personalization”, allowed Pandora to publish Facebook users’ information without their consent. Peter Deacon, a Michigan resident and also a Facebook user, claimed that Pandora is to be held responsible for illegally publishing his music preferences. To that, the District Court Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ruled that the company does not fall under Michigan’s privacy law, as it only streams music and does not lend, rent or sell it.

Deacon was not pleased with the decision, so he appealed the decision. He argued that the District Court’s judge misinterpreted the Michigan privacy law by ignoring “the commonly accepted, everyday meanings of the terms rent and lend.” He went on by saying that Armstrong’s judgment is in contradiction with Michigan’s lawmakers’ intention to protect consumers’ “choices in movies, music, and reading material from unwanted public disclosure.”
In response, the music service argued that:

“Temporarily caching data on listeners’ computers to enable streaming is not ‘renting’ or ‘lending’ under any common definition of those terms.”

“Pandora asks listeners only for musical preferences and then selects and streams ‘songs containing similar musical attributes’ that Pandora alone controls,” the online music service argues. “It would be entirely novel to have a rental or borrowing arrangement where the user does not even know what songs will be borrowed,” the company concluded.