Yahoo wins appeal of music-streaming case

A three-judge panel ruled Friday that Yahoo will not have to pay up every time it plays a song on its Internet radio service, affirming an earlier verdict.

The suit arose way back in 2001, when a division of Sony sued Launch Media claiming the service was bypassing a law that requires those who provide specific playlists of songs over the Internet to pay rights holders. Yahoo also acquired Launch Media that year, but has since turned over control of the service to CBS Radio, a division of the same corporation that publishes CNET News.
Yahoo won the case in 2007, but Sony appealed, resulting in Friday’s decision.

In what is being seen as a defeat for the music industry, Yahoo Music was not deemed “interactive” enough to require the company to negotiate with record companies for the rights to play songs over the Internet. Instead, it merely has to pay licensing fees to digital music rights organization SoundExchange.

 

Yahoo search era ends with Microsoft link

Yahoo Inc.’s 15-year nightmare  of online search supremacy ended with a whimper Wednesday when it signed away control of its trademark search platform to Microsoft Corp after years of of rumors, negotiations and reversals .

Microsoft is taking over Yahoo’s search platform under the 10-year-deal, replacing it with Bing, the Redmond, Wash., company’s newly revamped search engine. That allows the software maker to tap into the Web’s second-largest search audience in its quest to win over users from Google, which dominates both online search and advertising.

A new era at Yahoo began the minute CEO Carol Bartz signed the paperwork turning over the right to conduct searches on Yahoo’s huge network of Web sites to Microsoft in exchange for 88 percent of the revenue generated by Microsoft’s Bing.

Bartz seems to have decided that Yahoo doesn’t have the ability or the will to take on Google directly, arguing that the company should focus on what it does best and leave the technology to others.

“We’re not a search company,” Bartz said flat-out in June, discussing how Yahoo is a different company than Google or Microsoft. Now that she’s made that distinction official, what is Yahoo?

“It’s where people find relevant and contextual information,” Bartz said in May.

With this deal Microsoft believes that they are one step closer to dominating Google Inc.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said “Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,”.

But the move also closes the door on what many consider the original Internet search engine, established by two Stanford University electrical engineering graduate students – David Filo and Jerry Yang – during the 1990s ramp-up of the Internet.

Microsoft said the deal will give Bing, a search engine launched June 3, “the scale necessary to more effectively compete, attracting more users and advertisers, which in turn will lead to more relevant ads and search results.”

One analyst said this would give Bing more of the approximately 30 percent of online searches that do not use Google.

“For Microsoft, I think this [deal] is good,” said Mary-Jo Foley, a veteran technology journalist and Microsoft blogger. “They get rid of the No. 2 search competitor; they’re now providing the search engine for Yahoo; and Microsoft doesn’t have to shell out $47 billion to get Yahoo’s search [volume]. It’s helpful to them to get a little bit more leg up against Google.”

Is Yahoo on a path to becoming the world’s biggest content aggregation site? If so, there are obviously far more costs that can be wrung out of its various products: how many people are required to produce OMG!? Does Yahoo Sports need all those writers? Couldn’t the company just hire a few people to keep the site filled with content from partners and save a boatload without sacrificing traffic?

Yahoo, a survivor of the 2001 dot-com crash, has struggled to keep pace since then. Will Yahoo be a pheoenix after this deal..?