United States v. American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) et al., No. 09-0539, 2010 WL 3749292 (2nd Cir. 2010), was a United States Court of Appeals case involving copyright liability for third-party vendors that provide online music download services. In particular, the Second Circuit ruled that music downloads do not constitute public performances, upholding the district court's decision and consequently preventing ASCAP from claiming higher royalty fees from Yahoo! and RealNetworks for downloaded music. However, the Second Circuit disagreed with the district court's method of fee assessment and remanded the case for further proceedings. ASCAP appealed the decision and requested a writ of certiorari for judicial review in the Supreme Court. Background information Yahoo! and RealNetworks sought blanket licenses from ASCAP, a non-profit organization exclusively licensing more than 390,000 songwriters, composers, lyricists, and music publishers in the United States. A blanket license is a "license that gives the licensee the right to perform all of the works in the repertory for a single stated fee that does not vary depending on how much music from the repertory the licensee actually uses." In order to settle the royalty payments owed to the music owners represented by ASCAP, the companies and ASCAP sought an assessment from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. During the proceedings to establish a reasonable royalty rate, ASCAP claimed that individual downloads count as public performances, allowing a copyright holder's exclusive performance rights to be factored into the assessment of fees in addition to the exclusive rights of reproduction and distribution. If downloads were to count as public performances, each download would serve to increase the rate of royalties owed to copyright holders that licensed through ASCAP. Yahoo! and RealNetworks disagreed, citing that downloads involved only reproduction and distribution rights, not performance rights. This case centers around the controversial issue of royalty rates for internet radio under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA, passed in 1998, included provisions that required Internet and satellite radio providers to pay performance royalties in addition to the standard publishing royalties paid by radio stations. This case falls under a consent decree originally entered into by ASCAP and the judicial department in 1941 as part of an antitrust case. Some scholars question the utility of such consent decrees as a means for resolving modern copyright issues, citing that such decrees failed to anticipate