The RIAA said it would file no more "new" lawsuits against individual file-swappers, but it filed more such lawsuits in April.

Beckerman noted that the music labels had filed new cases in April, despite their claim to Congress (and Ars) that they had stopped "initiating new lawsuits" in August 2008.

But as the Time Warner Cable data caps issue showed, nothing makes the grassroots angrier than a massive corporation interfering with their Internet. And nothing gives a Congressman or Senator more incentive to stand up to corporations than an angry mob of voters.

The recording industry has accepted a paltry $7,000 to settle a long-running federal music piracy lawsuit it brought against a family in New York four years ago.

"We are pleased to have reached an agreement with the Santangelos," Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, told AP. She declined to comment on how much the organisation had spent to secure the $7,000 settlement.

"We don't break out costs per case, and it's not a question of it being 'worth it' or a 'victory'," she said.

One of the four men convicted in The Pirate Bay trial is seeking to have his guilty verdict thrown out after learning that the judge in the trial is a member of two pro-copyright groups, including one whose membership includes entertainment industry representatives who argued in the case.

"It wasn't appropriate for him to take on this case," says Eric Bylander, senior lecturer in procedure law at Gothenburg University.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message.

"There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that," he said.

"There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can't encourage people to break copyright law, I'm not following it and I don't agree with it."

A FoxNews.com journalist got himself into serious hot water over the weekend after he published a review of an illegally downloaded copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine ahead of its 1 May release.

Reports over the weekend claim that News Corp, which owns Fox News and 20th Century Fox, had fired Friedman following his decision to illegally download Wolverine.

Wolverine made its unauthorised debut last Tuesday. Its distributor, 20th Century Fox, coughed to the embarrassing leak the following day, when the studio said it would easily be able to track down the culprit.

In early June of 2007, Susan Simon noticed odd things happening to her internet connection and traced the troubles to an outfit called Adzilla that turned out to be spying on everything she did online.

The purported class-action lawsuit seeks to put another spike in the heart of online marketers' dreams of total information awareness.

Neij explained that an extended group of people have privileges on the server, and contribute haphazardly as they see fit. The prosecutor seemed not to grasp the concept.

"But someone must ultimately decide whether to put up a certain text or graphic," he protested.

"No," Neij answered. "Why? If someone believes a new text is needed, he just inputs it. Or if a graphic is ugly, someone makes a better one. The one who wants to do something just does it."

Two new federal proposals that Republican supporters claim will protect children have alarmed Internet companies, who say the measures could make it a crime to provide e-mail.

The mere provision of e-mail, electronic storage, cloud-computing services, and social-networking sites could be viewed as an act that "facilitates access to" illegal content, especially if the provider knows that some users in the past have been less than law-abiding.

The RIAA has been outed as a lying toad as it claimed in a letter sent out on December 23rd last year that it was discontinuing lawsuits when in fact, this was simply not the case.

Mitch Bainwol's letter to the Congressional Committees claimed that the Recording Industry Association of America "discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August."

Of course this information was taken as red, yet after a bit of digging around, this was found to be utter tosh.

Frank Zappa's widow, Gail Zappa, has been rather aggressive over the years in "protecting" the intellectual property associated with Frank Zappa and his music. Most recently, she tried to stop the very popular Zappanale festival, held each year in Bad Doberan, Germany.

Gail Zappa apparently was quite upset by this, and sued the organizers for trademark infringement, demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for daring to celebrate her husband's music without a license.