Way Clear for Gateway to Offer Music Tracks

A legal dispute that threatened to derail Gateway Inc.’s groundbreaking plan to load music on its computers has been resolved quietly amid growing interest in such offerings by rival PC makers.

Months after announcing a first-of-its-kind deal in December to preload 2,000 tracks from music subscription service Pressplay onto its PCs, Poway-based Gateway withdrew the offering for several weeks because of a dispute between Pressplay and music publishers.

The publishers, who own copyrights on songs, had sent a cease-and-desist order saying Gateway’s deal did not fall under an October 2001 deal covering publishers’ digital royalties.