Problems with protecting music on the internet

The protection of music on the Internet has raised several concerns, both legal and technical. Questions such as At what point is copyright violated on the Internet? Who can enforce these rights? Who is liable for copyright violations? and How will these rights be enforced? have largely remained unanswered, despite attempts to pass bills through Congress in the US, and the work of companies to develop watermarking technology.

National boundaries have proved a problem for the enforcement of copyright laws on the Internet, raising questions of which law in which country should be responsible for enforcing intellectual property rights? The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) is responsible for "the promotion of the protection of intellectual property throughout the world through co-operation among States, and for the administration of various multilateral treaties dealing with the legal and administrative aspects of intellectual property" [44].

There are also problems involved in developing the appropriate technology. Tests carried out on existing watermarking software have proven disappointing. A letter sent by the MUSE project to software developers stated that

The tests which have been finished until now have shown that none of the submitted systems fully meet the criteria in the Request for Proposals. For this reason we have decided to extend the project, to allow current candidates to submit new versions of their systems. More than half the submitted systems did meet the criteria for inaudibility, but the results of the robustness tests were less than we had hoped for." [45]

The watermarking used by some systems could not withstand the conversion from digital to analogue and back to digital, and some even encountered problems with simple, PC-based conversions - a situation which is problematic given that many of today's audio pirates work from simple PC workstations in their own homes. There is no doubt that this delay in finding an acceptable standard for watermarking technology is preventing the music industry from realising its full potential on the World Wide Web, but it is hoped that when the technology is discovered, Internet piracy will become easier to control (if not eradicate) and the music industry will invest more time and money in relocating a large part of its $40 billion industry to the Internet.