THE world's $40 billion a year music industry, battling to protect copyrights in the tangled sprawl of the World Wide Web, plans to introduce electronic tagging to charge listeners in cyberspace.
Officials revealed the plan last week at a major conference in Geneva. Nicholas Garnett, director general of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry - (IFPI) lobby group whose 1,100 members include record producers BMG, EMI, MCA, Sony Music and PolyGram, said in the digital era the rules between music consumers and producers had to be rewritten.
"We'll come up with security systems to prevent piracy. There will be identification tags. Unless you supply the key, no one can listen to music."
Books publishers and record moguls gathered at the conference last week with representatives of more than loo member governments of the UN's agency that administers international pacts on patents, copyrights and trademarks. For three weeks they will debate and draw up three new treaties intended to bring copyright rules into the digital age.
The UN agency, the World Intellectual Property Organisation, administers international pacts on patents, copyrights and trademarks. At present, relatively little copyright material is put legally onto the Net because authors, publishers and performers fear they will lose income from unauthorised copying.
According to the IFPI, electronic delivery of music recordings could take 15 per cent of the $40 billion global music business within five years. The conference will debate draft treaties which aim to:
. Ensure that electronic transmission (or on demand broadcasting) of any copyrighted work is subject to the same rules on authorisation and royalty payments that apply to "hard copies" of works.
. Apply these rules even to temporary copies of the work (for instance, to music called up from an online "jukebox" but not permanently stored in the listener's computer).
. Forbid devices designed to erase or circumvent encryption techniques used to allocate royalties or prevent unauthorised copying.
. Protect databases, even where copyright material is not involved, which represent "a substantial investment" of resources.