Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. have agreed to pay songwriters and music publishers $47.5 million in damages for copyright infringement and overdue royalties to settle a class action lawsuit.

It may not be Linux-related, but this is just not right. You may have heard of Jamie Thomas's trial a while ago. She is being accused of infringing on the copyrights of 24 songs, by sharing them with a P2P service. I have no idea if this is guilty or not, but the fine is simply too much : $80,000 for every song.

You may have read about the unusual case where a law firm was sued for going to the Internet Archive and printing out some pages it found there, to use as evidence in a case. They won the case, but then they were accused by the loser of copyright infringement, "hacking" or a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and violating the DMCA by bypassing a robots.txt file.