Taiwanese funeral homes allegedly lack permission to play recorded music at services, resulting in two lawsuits. But the industry says it has the right to broadcast that music for the private use of surviving family members. The cases point to a lingering copyright problem in Taiwan, despite nearly 20 years of efforts to crack down on copyright infringement.

Taiwanese funeral homes play pre-recorded music at traditional ceremonies, some of which also involve live bands and street parades to honor the dead. Claiming that every funeral session's music use should be licensed, two Taiwanese recording studios have gone to court this year. Judges on the island have already thrown out three similar cases.

A lawyer for one of the plaintiffs declined to comment. But Wang Mei-hua, director general of the Taiwan government's Intellectual Property Office, says the cases are complicated because funeral parlors already own the music CDs and do not believe they should meet the studios' demands for an additional $30 per service. The music itself is based on Buddhist chants and not copyrighted.

Wang says because the funeral industry charges money, the studios think they should pay for playing the music. But funeral operators argue that playing the music is just a small part of a bigger package of services for survivors. And she says the studios want a lot of money and the two sides cannot work out a deal.

Piracy ran rampant during Taiwan's economic growth and rise from poverty through the early 1990s, so copyright violations were once more clear cut.

The island cracked down on illegal manufacturers or vendors of pirated discs under pressure from music, film and software giants overseas. The market where consumers could buy illegally copied music and software on the street or in public markets was shut down by the campaign.

Taiwan raised its number of busts per year from 1,000 to 2,000 in the 1990s to more than 2,000 after it set up an intellectual property rights police force in 2003. Hardly anyone openly sells mass-produced pirated music, films or software on the street in Taiwan anymore, officials say.

The world copyright battleground today is nearby China, where factories churn out discs for sale in crowded tourist districts. Up to 95 percent of music sales in China are unauthorized, according to some estimates. But Taiwan may experience a resurgence in the market for pirated music as locals use laptops and tablet PCs to download tunes from overseas without paying.

The problem has escaped the control of local authorities, says John Eastwood, an American-born lawyer with Eiger Law in Taiwan. "Taiwan has changed significantly in recent years. In the old days, everything moved around in the form of CD-ROMs, DVDs and CDs," Eastwood said. "But these days with the advent of mobile devices, everything has gone online. It is a huge deal in terms of the change to the enforcement environment. With the world having moved online, that is where the piracy has gone."

The government copyright office says the illegal download issue is international and that to solve it requires cooperation from the overseas Internet platforms that allow downloads. But it says the funeral music issue, which is unique to Taiwan and has no immediate solution, could aggravate other festering copyright disputes.|But it says other festering copyright disputes could be aggravated by the funeral music issue, which is unique to Taiwan and has no immediate solution, the office says.

Covers of music by live performers at Taiwan's more elaborate funerals might lead to payment demands by rights holders. Five Taiwanese collective management societies have already begun demanding varying payments for copyrighted sing-along tunes used by the wildly popular Karaoke bars.

Bar owners do not know which groups control which songs or how much is a fair price, leading to disputes in court.

Wang says the issue is complicated. Karaoke bars in most countries have just one intermediary group that collects money. Taiwan has five, adding complexity and outraging the operators of those entertainment venues, she says.

The two pending lawsuits over pre-recorded chants and seven other claims seeking out-of-court copyright settlements will disappear, funeral directors believe. Kuo Hui-chen, head of the Funeral Business Association in the central Taiwan city of Taichung, where the suits were filed, says the 2,000 funeral homes represented by her association plan to continue playing music CDs for survivors of the deceased.