COLUMN ONE : Digital Double Trouble : From rap music to medical formulas, little seems safe from duplication. Ownership rights must be redefined when images, sound, bits of data can be copied--and zapped around the world.

Who knew that Marle Marl was dissing copyright law and opening up a gaping pothole on the information superhighway when he began using digital computer technology to make rap music nearly a decade ago?

“In 1985, I just started recording kicks and snares of drummers and rearranged them” to create new beats, said Marl, who rose from working as a club DJ to recording and producing for the House of Hitz label in New York.

As an avid and early practitioner of “sampling”--using digital recorders to copy snippets of other people’s performances, electronically manipulate them and then include the sounds in new musical works--Marl expected to ignite dance fever, not controversy.

But sampling has created a multibillion-dollar legal morass--confusion that underscores the difficulties of defining issues as fundamental as ownership and power in a digital age where information can be copied or altered with a few keystrokes.

With silicon microchips, an exact electronic replica can be made of virtually any medium--images, sound or data. The February cover of Scientific American magazine, for instance, featured a digitally altered photograph that showed Marilyn Monroe flirting with Abraham Lincoln. Two years ago, pop singer Paula Abdul hoofed it up with a youthful Gene Kelly in a Diet Coke commercial, thanks to digital imaging.

Armed with personal computers and digital recorders, entrepreneurs around the globe are using digital technology in more foreboding ways. They are making unauthorized copies of billions of dollars’ worth of music, movies, software, pharmaceutical formulas and other so-called intellectual property.

And thanks to the growing matrix of global computer networks, they can zap the appropriated works to consumers around the world in seconds.

Such technological feats are testing the effectiveness of the U.S. patent, trade secret and copyright laws. The challenge comes amid final consideration of a new global trade accord aimed, in part, at extending intellectual property protections that help generate more than $50 billion a year for the U.S. music and film industries.

The spread of digital technology is quickly eroding the political and geographic boundaries that have allowed industry and governments to maintain control over information through legal measures.

“The reason this nation’s copyright laws appeared to work so well for so long was because it was physically hard to make a book or a record; you had to have the physical product to pass it around,” said John Perry Barlow, a songwriter for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Washington group that lobbies on cyberspace issues. “Now you don’t have to have that anymore. Information is becoming liquid. It can no longer be contained.”

Already, news articles and other documents routinely are distributed on computer networks to millions of people. That, say experts, should give pause to entrepreneurs who have been excitedly talking about offering U.S. households movies-on-demand and other pay-per-view fare.

“Some people will just pick stuff off the (TV) screen like it’s nothing,” said Hal Varian, a University of Michigan economics professor--and then copy and distribute to friends and neighbors for free.

Concerns about the ease of copying artistic and intellectual works have been around since the advent of the printing press.

Performing musicians have been feeling the effects of recording technology for at least half a century--ever since jukeboxes and taped music began replacing bands in many restaurants and bars. Music licensing organizations such as BMI and ASCAP police bars, suing owners who do not pay royalties for each recording they play. The conflicts only have grown with new advances, such as audio- and videotape recorders.

But VCRs and non-digital, or “analog,” audiotape machines have limited capabilities. When an original film or master recording is re-recorded, the quality is diminished.

Digital technology ended all that. A digital recorder transforms information--sounds, images or data--into an electronic code that can be reconstructed by a digital playback machine with no loss of quality. A bootlegged copy of a fifth-generation digital recording is virtually indistinguishable from the master tape stored in the vault at corporate headquarters.

This technology is finding its way into many more hands via the personal computer revolution, making it easy for ordinary Americans to make the kind of mirror-image duplicates that once required costly equipment.

William J. Mitchell, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offers a troubling glimpse of quandaries about the very building blocks of information that could arise in a digital world.

For example, he asked in the February issue of Scientific American, what should one do if presented with a sharp, detailed “photograph” of Elvis Presley in a contemporary setting?

“We can either maintain our confidence in the reliability of the prior evidence that Elvis is dead and reject the image as a visual falsehood,” Mitchell wrote, “or we can accept the new evidence before us and correspondingly modify our beliefs. Such judgments will be increasingly crucial and increasingly difficult to make with confidence in a world where convincing visual evidence can be faked with ease.”

Photographs represent only the tip of the iceberg.

There are a host of things, ranging from credit cards to phone calls, that can be digitally recorded, altered and reproduced in a form that is indistinguishable from the original.

Already, law enforcement officials say they have their hands full chasing the enterprising criminal who uses a computer scanner to copy checks or money orders and then digitally substitute his or her name after adding a few zeros to the amount to be paid.

“This is a serious problem,” said Varian, the Michigan economics professor. “Right now I could take a photograph from Playboy, scan the picture and send it out over the entire Internet,” he said, referring to the fast-growing global matrix of computer networks. “This can be done completely anonymously, without a trace. But this sort of behavior could cause serious economic problems, (because) . . . if you don’t protect intellectual property, people will have little incentive to develop it.”

Indeed, Playboy Enterprises successfully sued a computer bulletin board in Florida last year that was making it possible for personal computer users to download pictures of Playboy magazine models.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Commissioner Bruce H. Lehman says he is not quite as alarmed by such copying. But he concedes that digital technology “is raising important legal questions . . . and posing a real challenge to anyone seeking to maintain the copyright integrity of their work.”

President Clinton appointed Lehman to serve as chairman of a government intellectual property task force. Lehman said the group is exploring proposals to boost legal protection in the digital age, including development of some sort of “electronic envelope” that would prevent unauthorized persons from perusing or copying information.

The idea is to encrypt data with an inseparable electronic code that would determine who could gain access. A New York City company called Wave Systems Corp. already is testing a technology that not only determines who gets access to information but can automatically charge someone’s credit card for using the data.

“We call it digital vending,” said Jim Kollegger, marketing vice president at the firm.

Only lately have electronic envelopes emerged as a necessity.

For more than two centuries, the United States has made it a matter of policy to provide broad legal protections that allow individuals to reap financial rewards from their inventions. Patents, for instance, are property rights granted to inventors, providing a 17-year right to exclude others from making, using or selling the protected product. Trademarks and copyrights confer similar protections.

But in the digital age, many groups--including the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the Washington-based trade group--say the old intellectual property laws need to be overhauled.

With the RIAA’s backing, a bill has been introduced in Congress to grant copyright owners of sound recordings the exclusive right to control the transmission of their works by cable TV owners, computer hackers and others with access to digital recording and transmission devices. The measure is aimed at creating a new performance right for artists and record companies so they, like songwriters and music publishers, would be compensated for the dissemination of music they create.

Without such protections, “we will be unable to compete in this emerging digital era,” said RIAA President Jason S. Berman.

“It’s like the wild, wild West,” agreed Dan L. Burk, a George Mason University law professor who has written about patent and computer law. “There’s a whole lot of unsettled legal problems out there in cyberspace.”

It is not for lack of trying that there are no guidelines. In 1988, for example, the United States levied $39 million in annual tariff increases on Brazilian pharmaceutical imports after U.S. drug makers alleged that Brazilian firms were stealing formulas and producing medicines even before U.S. manufacturers could offer them for sale in Brazil.

Nevertheless, pharmaceutical patent theft in Brazil--which the U.S. drug industry claims cost them more than $500 million in sales last year--has continued, prompting the Brazilian government to announce recently that it will seek passage of tougher laws by June.

A similar crackdown in the music world seems to have had little effect on copying. Three years ago, a federal judge in New York issued an opinion against rapper Biz Markie admonishing him, in biblical terms, that “thou shalt not steal.” The judge granted an injunction against Markie for the unlicensed use of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1972 song, “Alone Again (Naturally).”

Despite that high-profile precedent, recording industry observers say appropriation of music continues. Some samplers are careful to get copyright clearance. But others are able to forgo such legal niceties--in part because digital technology enables them to manipulate original compositions beyond recognition.

In the last nine years, Marl says he has amassed recordings of more than 1,000 different drum beats on 3 1/2-inch computer disks, using those samples in records he has produced for artists such as L.L. Cool J and Heavy D.

“He’s one of the very first to use it,” said Russell Simmons, the rap music mogul who is chief executive of Rush Communications.

Marl’s $2,500 E-Mu Systems SP 1200 sampling drum machine allows him to translate the “wave form” of any sound--from a snare drum to breaking glass--into digital code. That code then can be manipulated by a digital microprocessor so the original sound is changed in syncopation or altered in a host of other ways, all by simply twisting a few knobs.

Because of rap’s reputation for gritty lyrics, Marl said, “some people won’t give me permission to sample their music.” But having successfully borrowed from so many others, he said he doesn’t get mad when people sample his works without his permission.

“It’s an art form,” Marl said of rap music, “and I just want to see the music get out there.”

Of course, his music publisher, EMI, has a different attitude. Said Marl: “They usually go after people” who don’t get clearances.