Little did Leonardo Chariglione know when, back in the late 1980s, he chaired an inter-industry committee charged with developing a video version of the compact disc, that one version of the technology would be hijacked to create a piracy device now wreaking havoc in the music business.

The device was the MP3, the compressed sound file on which digital versions of millions of songs are now posted on pirate Internet sites and downloaded on to consumers' computers.

Having initially dismissed the MP3 craze as a cult phenomenon for computer "geeks", the music industry is now so alarmed at the speed with which digital downloading has spread, that it is desperately trying to find ways of commercialising it.

Earlier this year, the world's record companies joined forces with their electronics and computing counterparts to launch the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), which aims to define an internationally applicable framework for a legitimate online music market. When it came to appointing a chairman, they chose Mr Chariglione, who had returned to his "day job" as a senior Telecom Italia executive after unwittingly presiding over the birth of MP3 piracy.

He now faces the challenge of persuading hundreds of different companies, many with conflicting commercial interests, to accept a pirate-proof technology which will be so attractive that consumers will pay for music on the Internet and other digital delivery systems, rather than getting it for free from pirate sites.

Mr Chariglione is the first to admit that his task is formidable. "My industry, the mighty telecoms industry, was taken unawares by the explosion of the Internet, and the mighty music industry was taken unawares too," he says. A critical difference is that, whereas the Internet promises to increase demand for existing services and to create profitable new niches for telecoms, in the music market the MP3 craze also threatens to trigger a steep increase in piracy to the detriment of existing players.

Piracy has long been a problem for the music industry. Record companies have tackled it by deploying investigators to help the authorities identify pirates and prepare legal cases against them.

Curbing Internet piracy will be much tougher, partly because of the logistical difficulty of tracking down tens of thousands of illicit website operators worldwide.

Another complication is that, in contrast to compact disc or cassette piracy, the MP3 phenomenon has developed before the legitimate market, rather than after it.

"What we have to do is create a framework for a legitimate marketplace which is so convenient that consumers will want to use it," says Mr Chariglione. "Some people enjoy spending hours going from site to site looking for pirated music only to see `File not found' flash on their screen, but most of them don't."

SDMI is starting by developing the specifications for a new type of portable audio player with software designed so that it restricts the recording of only those songs posted on the Internet with the copyright owners' permission. It would also be able to copy tracks from legal compact discs.

Similar products, notably Diamond Multimedia's $199 (€184) Rio, are already available but are principally used to download pirated MP3 files.

Mr Chariglione hopes that, once the authorised players go on sale, probably before Christmas, consumers will prefer them and manufacturers, including Diamond, which is an SDMI member, will be persuaded to phase out any players with pirated MP3 capacity.

Once the portable player issue is resolved, SDMI will address the wider question of ensuring that music can be digitally delivered to consumers in a secure manner. With so many different types of sound files already in use, or under development, it seems likely that SDMI will concentrate on reconfiguring the recording process to prevent music from being illegally copied. The protected recording could then be safely transferred to CDs, or to secure MP3 and MP4 files.

If all goes well, Mr Chariglione hopes to have completed this process by next April and then to apply his SDMI experience to other media. "SDMI's agenda could be adapted for different types of multimedia products," he says.

"What's happening to music now could also eventually affect video games and movies."