Project Playlist has been sued by nine major record labels for "massive infringement" of their copyrights.

The website, which allows users to find, play and share music with others for free, gets more than 600,000 daily users and an average of 9.5 million daily page views, according to the record labels.

Major recording companies including Warner Music Group, EMI Group's Capital Records and Universal Music Group are seeking to prevent Project Playlist from offering users free music.

A new study has indicated that a large number of US teens are completely unaware of the legal issues surrounding the downloading of music, movies and other content from the internet.

Data released by Microsoft showed that around half of US teenagers were not familiar with digital piracy laws and that just 11 percent completely understood the rules.

The research showed that teenagers between seventh and tenth grades were less likely to illegally download content from the internet when they knew the laws for downloading and sharing content online.

More and more people from the US are opting to watch TV over the internet, a new study has shown.

Research from Solutions Research Group found that 80 million Americans - or 43 percent of the online population - watched one of their favorite TV shows on the internet in recent months.

This compares to just 25 percent who watched TV over the net a year ago.

What's more, 20 percent of people now say they watch TV on the web on a weekly basis.

Interestingly, abc.com emerged as the best of the major networks for streaming shows, followed by Fox.

People in the US are increasingly pirating popular TV shows and making them available to the world via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, a report has stated.

The BBC reported that shows such as Lost, Desperate Housewives and 24 are becoming increasingly easy for people to download on popular filesharing networks and this is causing problems for the networks in the US.

Dr David Price, head of piracy intelligence at web monitoring firm Envisional, explained to the UK broadcaster: "Most episodes come online about half an hour after it first airs in the US.

Reports suggest that the website of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is now up again after it was brought down by a hacker over the weekend.

The site was hacked on Sunday (January 20th), and website TorrentFreak reported that "someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site's entire database".

People posting on the social news site Reddit also suggested that the RIAA's website seems to use an Exponent Content Management System which had "a lot of vulnerabilities ... including SQL injection".

AT&T has said that it is considering introducing filters to block users of its internet services from downloading copyright-infringing materials.

At the recent CES show in Las Vegas, AT&T lawyer James Cicconi, said that the telecoms giant believed that network-level filtering was the "optimal" way to deal with piracy.

More and more people are using online video sharing sites such as YouTube, a new report has suggested.

Nielsen Online suggested that the writers' strike has driven people to use video sharing site more. According to the company, Google-owed YouTube has seen an 18 percent traffic surge in the two months since the writers' strike began in November. Analyst Alex Burmaster commented: "That is greater growth than you would normally see in such a short period and the strike could be a possible factor."

Sony BMG has revealed that it will launch a service that lets consumers download music which is free of copy protection software.

The record label said that its new Platinum MusicPass enables consumers to download full-length albums as high-quality MP3 files. These files will not have a Digital Rights Management system, which means that they will work in almost all MP3 players.

"The MP3 files delivered through MusicPass play on computers, as well as on all MP3 players, including iPods," explained Sony BMG's Thomas Hesse.

A new report has identified which songs and movies were most downloaded via peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks in 2007.

Wired News used data from BigChampagne Online Media Measurement to determine the most popular legal and illegal downloads of the year.

The news agency asked BigChampagne to concentrate solely on P2P traffic from sites like BitTorrent, Gnutella and eDonkey.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has won a lawsuit against the website TorrentSpy.com.

A federal judge ruled in favor of the MPAA because the website's operators repeatedly failed to provide, or altered, important evidence in the case.

Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of the US District Court for the Central District of California decided that TorrentSpy.com had infringed the copyrights of the MPAA.