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Dating to a 1909 statute designed to balance the rights of composers and the makers of player piano rolls, that law has been applied to phonographs, L.P.'s, cassette tapes, CD's and, with a 1995 legislative amendment, permanent digital downloads.

But what happens when a download is designed to expire after a month? What about when consumers pay to listen to music of their choice over the Internet, but not to make a copy of it? The Copyright Office, unsure how to stretch old law around new technology, collected public comments on the subject, but has yet to make a ruling or set a rate.

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Last year, the Harry Fox Agency, which represents the majority of the nation's music publishers, agreed to license whatever the online music services asked for in exchange for a $1 million payment up front and the promise that the services would account for every use of their work and pay for it after the Copyright Office sets a rate.

But the Fox agency, accustomed to licensing a few tracks at a time for a movie or a commercial, has been inundated with requests for hundreds of thousands of clearances.

MusicNet, which offers subscribers access to its music catalog for $10 a month, got the go-ahead from EMI Music to put up "Come Away With Me," the debut album of Norah Jones, on the day it came out in February. After a routine exchange with Harry Fox, whose own computer database is still under construction and often cannot immediately show which songs it has a right to license, the tracks finally were made available online earlier this month.

The recording industry's deal with Harry Fox, the licensing affiliate of the National Music Publishers' Association, does not cover thousands of independent publishers, including those of many major artists, who tend to control their own publishing rights.

Linda Komorsky, who handles publishing for the Steve Miller Band, said she asked MusicNet for a payment in advance, just like the Fox agency got.

"No matter what the rate is at this point and for the next five years, none of it would buy you or I a pair of shoes," Ms. Komorsky said. "We're happy to license but we want to get paid something."

Since revenue from television and movie licensing is substantial — Mr. Miller received over a million dollars for use of "Jungle Love" in a movie trailer — there is no burning need for Ms. Komorsky to license to Internet services. But at least she responded to the request. Pressplay has simply decided not to pursue music whose publishing rights are not represented by Harry Fox because of the time and labor involved in negotiating with publishers.

"You try to tell the publishers, `look what's happening with the pirate services,' and they're oblivious," said a record executive who insisted on anonymity. "There's no particular motivation for them to spend money on overhead or learning about the business. We call them up, they say `put it in writing,' so we put it in writing and we never hear back."

Publishers in turn say that the chief culprit for holding up the digital future lies elsewhere.

"The reason why the Beatles are not up there is not because Michael Jackson and Sony, who own the publishing rights, have not authorized it — they have," said Carey Ramos, a lawyer for the National Music Publishers' Association. "The reason is the surviving Beatles will not authorize the use of their recordings. The same is true with regard to Neil Diamond or Madonna. It's the artists who are really holding this up."

Artists, through their managers and lawyers, point to the labels.

"You don't have to manufacture anything, ship it anyplace, put it in a warehouse, take it back, scrap it or salvage it and you don't have to wait as long as you normally wait to get paid," said L. Lee Phillips, the chief of the music department at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, a Los Angeles law firm whose clients include the Eagles and Aimee Mann. "So there's a lot of added profit to the record label which they don't want to share."

Meanwhile, at the online music services, which are trying to fashion a business based on respecting the copyrights of all of the constituencies, some progress is being made.

"When we cleared David Bowie and Pink Floyd I was turning cartwheels," John Jones, the chief of content acquisition for MusicNet, said one recent morning as he reviewed a list of 1,700 tracks that were set to go up on the service. It was an eclectic mix of songs from Al Green, Blind Melon, Crowded House, Roxy Music, the O'Jays and Kiri Te Kanawa, the soprano, performing "Greensleeves."

"You can't rest until everything is cleared," Mr. Jones said. "They're all fantastic to have. You want every recorded song."

Then he turned his attention to what he calls Quarantine Land. It was a longer list.