Watermarking clearly labels the copyright owner deep within the audio signal and in the event of a standard being developed for consumer hardware to read basic information embedded in the data, watermarking can assure the consumer of a product's authenticity. A bootleg, for example would indicate its origin in a promotional product or indicate its bootleg status by a lack of information.

As far as the Internet is concerned, companies have been developing special programs which search the World Wide Web for sites that include audio or video clips, and verify the intellectual copyright of those clips by reading a watermark . Intersect Inc. Is a US-based company which has developed MusicTrak, a monitoring and reporting system which tracks the use of music on the Internet. Using Audio Video Scan (AVS) technology, Intersect can search up to eleven million Web pages per day for MPEG, RealAudio, Liquid Audio and other media formats used to distribute music and video. AVS technology also supports new media file formats as they become available and can search the entire Internet (currently around 60 million sites) in just two weeks. [41]

Intersect's MusicTrak system comprises of three elements

1. WebCrawling subsystem
2. Indexing Subsystem
3. Search Engine Subsystem

The first of these subsystems, the WebCrawling Subsystem also known as a spider or bot, is an intelligent software agent that runs without an operator, searching the Internet and retrieving data by

1. crawling the Web, sending and receiving replies to and from Web Servers
   
   
2. retrieving documents, obtaining a copy of every page on the Web for the purpose of scanning for music files
   
   
3. searching for new URLs and other references embedded within Web pages
   
   
4. delivering documents in the form of HTML pages to the Indexing subsystems, which register the Web address of every form of media clip available on the Internet . This database can then be searched on behalf of record companies or collection agencies to discover who is using their music, where it can be found, what use is being made of it and whether it is a legitimate or illegal copy. Legal action can then be taken on Internet pirates.

A system diagram of the Intersect MusicTrak monitoring solution [42]

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