The digital music revolution squabble isn't just for record labels and technology companies anymore, thanks in part to a new alliance of international copyright societies.

On Wednesday, five composer and songwriter organizations -- BMI of the United States, GEMA of Germany, SACEM of France, SGAE of Spain, and SIAE of Italy -- announced an alliance to develop a technology infrastructure to track music use across international borders.

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The BMI alliance hopes to speed international compensation for composers, but there remains a slight complication. Last April, ASCAP (the other United States copyright organization) formed the International Music Joint Venture (IMJV), with Dutch and English licensing agents, with the intention of doing the same job.

The IMJV database is a central database being created with one single standard of data entry, said Marc Morgenstern, executive vice president of the ASCAP enterprises group.

Compared to the BMI database, IMJV's "is the difference between access to each others' database and building a single, clean database that is managed by a third-party," said Phil Crosland, ASCAP's senior vice president of marketing.

Both organizations plan to build their infrastructures on the Common Information System (CIS), a collection of linked databases using international data exchange standards to monitor how works are used and to better protect copyrights. CIS was developed by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC).

Despite ASCAP's head start, the first of BMI's three "fast track" systems is expected to be finished before the end of the year, several months before IMJV's database is set to launch, said Robbin Ahrold, BMI vice president of corporate relations.

"We've agreed to combine our technical potential to jointly develop systems for each of our member groups that are compatible among all of us," Ahrold said of the alliance. "Now we can use the Internet as the primary route of exchange and make sure that all of our systems seamlessly interact with the others."

When completed, the fast track database will be accessible to any member of the new alliance and will aid in international documentation of the use of works, Ahrold said.