Two hackers that allegedly stole thousands of unreleased tracks from high-profile Sony Music artists - including Michael Jackson - after hacking into its US servers, have avoided jail time.

The Guardian reports that James Marks and James McCormick were looking for posthumous Michael Jackson releases to uncover rumours that they were sung by impersonators, and hacked in to the label’s systems from their home computers.

They pleaded guilty to downloading almost 8,000 files from Sony’s servers and after agreeing to ...