The music industry is under attack by Internet piracy and is feverishly fighting back with a plethora of copy protection methods built into music CDs.

But in their rush to halt illegal copying, are record companies themselves breaking the law?

In June of 1999, the now-defunct Napster service opened a Pandora's Box for the music industry, hooking an entire generation of young people on the ability to swap music -- some would say stolen music -- quickly and easily.

The fact that no Internet user has been able to fire up the Napster program in almost a year thanks to a U.S. court ruling hasn't stopped the phenomenon from spreading to rival services. Rip, mix and burn has become the anthem for a music-hungry public suckled on technology.

It's perhaps ironic then that to combat the piracy problem, Sony Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music (owned by media giant AOL Time Warner), Bertelsmann, and others have turned to technology to help stop the Internet from gouging record sales.

The solution, the music industry believes, is to embed anti-piracy technology into music CDs so that when an audiophile pops the disc into a computer, it won't play. However, if you place the same disc into a regular CD player, it works fine.

Sounds like a sensible idea, but the copy protection schemes being testing in North America and elsewhere are fraught with problems -- both legal and technological. In fact, the first legal volley has already been fired.

The five major record labels were recently hit with a class-action lawsuit in California charging that the new breed of Napster-proof music CDs are, in essence, defective.

The suit, the first of its kind since copy-protected CDs began to surface in record stores, deals with current laws which allow consumers to make one copy of a copyrighted recording "for personal, non-commerical use."

Although the laws being challenged in the suit are American -- the so-called Audio Home Recording Act -- in Canada, the current Copyright Act allows pretty much the same thing.

Under section 80 of the Copyright Act, anyone who owns a music recording -- regardless of whether it's on CD or not -- is allowed to make one copy for personal use.

Canadian law, however, strictly forbids people from "communicating to the public by telecommunication" the copied music. In other words, don't even think about uploading it to the Internet.

The problem is that the new breed of copy-protected CDs are preventing all forms of copying, whether it's for personal use or not. That, the lawsuit contends, is a violation of the public's rights.

And the troubles go even deeper.

The music format that's been used for almost 20 years -- the Digital Compact Disc or CD as it's widely known -- is owned by Dutch electronics giant Philips. So is the familiar little COMPACT DISC trademark logo stamped into the plastic of CD cases.

As co-creator of the music CD format, Philips precisely spells out what a CD is and how it should work. Complying with Philips' guidelines means record companies can use the disc format and its trademarked logo.

However, copy-protected CDs don't comply with Philips' scheme, but record companies continue to use the CD logo anyway. That's got Philips hopping mad.

"What we've seen so far is troublesome and cumbersome," Gerry Wirtz, Philips' manager of copyright, told a U.S. media outlet recently. "We worry (that the record labels) don't know what they're doing."

Users tend to agree. The lawsuit is demanding record companies put a warning label on all copy-protected CDs so that the public knows the disc might not play on all electronics equipment.

Some Macintosh users, already a pretty testy bunch, have been further irritated by that fact that some protected CDs can actually crash their computer.

In the end, however, it's unclear whether the copy-protected CD experiment will ever work.

In a very embarrassing slip for Sony Music, Internet users recently discovered that the company's anti-piracy technology used on Celine Dion's new release "A New Day Has Come" can be defeated be covering up the outer rim of the disc with a black magic marker. Overnight, millions of dollars in Sony research went up in smoke thanks to a 50-cent, low-tech device.

Consider this: Under the U.S.' controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's illegal to devise a method to defeat copyright technology. Does this mean Bic Pens can be sued for making magic markers?

It's clear a flurry of technological and legal questions surrounding copy-protected music CDs is confounding the industry and frustrating users. Unfortunately, a quick fix doesn't appear in sight.