Recent technological developments have created new challenges for the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights. The amendments to existing legislation in response to these technological developments, and legal and academic reactions to these amendments, indicate that existing laws cannot be easily extended, applied to, and enforced on new networks and media. So far, efforts to protect digital intellectual property have focused on protecting copies of works by preventing unauthorized uses. We agree with Gerovac and Solomon that protecting copies is not equivalent to protecting revenues. Revenues can be protected even if copies are not. One way of protecting revenues is by tracking the distribution volume of works. In this paper, we propose a distribution volume tracking system which keeps track of distribution volume of works by identifying and verifying their unique fingerprints based on their content and expression. For ease of communication, we refer to this system simply as DVT1. The DVT system described in this paper extends existing proposals to implement "non-commercial use levy" to ensure proper compensation to authors for works distributed in networks. The purpose of this DVT system is to ensure that content owners are compensated proportionally to the level of use of their works. We believe that DVT systems combined with payment mechanisms provide a potential solution to the digital copyright problem on many networks including the wireless grid. The solution supported by DVTs ensure proper rewards to copyright owners while increasing the value the content users can extract from creative works.
