Thousands of music videos pulled from YouTube in a royalties dispute will go back online after peace broke out today between the website and the music industry.

A rift has opened between music's creators and its record labels, with a broad alliance of musicians, songwriters and producers fiercely criticising the business secretary Lord Mandelson's plans to cut off the broadband connections of internet users who illegally download music.

The punishment stands at 3,000 euros for sharing more than 150 albums.

The man from Finland was earlier accused of sharing music files totaling 768Mb on the Internet - around 164 albums. A search of his computer turned up 1,850 tracks which had been downloaded from unauthorized sources.

"The concern is that we send out 1000 infringement notices, and then someone says, 'The way to stall this is let's all go to arbitration', and a year later we could still be going through that same process."

"Do we get to the point where we have 1000 cases to be heard by the Copyright Tribunal? If everyone brings their lawyer, we will only do five in a day."

Ms Holloway-Smith says it is vital that independent experts make the decision over whether copyright has been infringed, and that people have the right to defend themselves in person. "Otherwise you risk innocent people being punished."

Trina Thompson, 27, graduated in April from Monroe College in the Bronx, New York with a bachelor's degree in IT. That lofty educational achievement hasn't yet helped her land a job, and so she's suing the college for reimbursement of her tuition - $70,000 - plus an additional $2,000 "for the stress I have been going through looking for a full-time job on my own," according to court documents.

The New York Post quotes the aspiring admin as saying about her former school, "They have not tried hard enough to help me."

A seventeen-year-old high school senior has sued Amazon for vanishing George Orwell's 1984 from his Kindle ebook reader - and removing his personal annotations in the process.

Amazon's terms of service say that books are licensed not sold. But as the suit point out, they also say that users have the right to keep a "permanent copy" of purchased books and to "view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times." And the terms fail to explain that Amazon has the technical power or the right to remove content from personal devices.

A Mississippi high school student is suing her school district after a teacher logged into the student's social networking account and distributed information that embarrassed her and led to her removal from the team.

On Sept. 10, 2007, Pearl High School cheerleading coach Tommie Hill required each member of the cheerleading squad to reveal the passwords to their Facebook accounts, according to the suit.

According to the suit, the officials "reprimanded, punished, and humiliated" Jackson for an exchange of profanity-laced messages between Jackson and the cheerleading captain in which Jackson asked the student to "stop harassing" several of the cheerleaders.

Piracy watchdog Nexicon has found the ultimate way to turn piracy into profit for the fresh copyright holders added to their clientele. They offer alleged file-sharers the chance to settle for $10 per downloaded song or an equal amount for a pirated movie. If you decide not to settle, they promise to bankrupt you in court.

The company has a history as a cigarette retailer but went on to hunt pirates after they were sued for selling smokes to minors and failing to report their sales to the tax office.

The emails sent out by Nexicon to alleged infringers contain veiled threats of legal action if they don't choose to settle within 10 days.

However, because of these low fees and the use of threatening language we cannot help mentioning the word 'extortion' once more.

To the best of our knowledge they don't even have a proper license to act as private investigators which is a felony in several US states and renders the 'evidence' they have in their spreadsheets useless.

Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential Supreme Court nominee.

He wants to "bar linking" to newspaper articles or any copyrighted material without the "copyright holder's consent." I am sorry Judge Posner, but I don't need to ask your permission to link to your blog post or to a newspaper article online. That is just the way the Web works. If newspapers don't like it, they don't need to be on the Web.

Where does Judge Posner think all of these newspaper sites get their readers? It is mostly through links, not direct traffic. Removing the links would obliterate the majority of the online readership for many newspapers.

The Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany, has ruled that file-hosting service Rapidshare must proactively filter certain content. Music industry outfit GEMA asked the court to ban Rapidshare from making 5,000 tracks from its catalogue available on the Internet.

"The decision of the Hamburg Regional Court is a milestone in GEMA's fight against the illegal use of musical works on the Internet," said Dr. Harald Heker, Chief Executive Officer of GEMA.

In a surprise decision, the jury imposed damages against Thomas-Rasset at a whopping $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of stealing.

In 2007, the Recording Industry Association of America claimed in a lawsuit that Thomas-Rasset pilfered 1,700 songs. The RIAA eventually culled that number down to a representative sample of 24.