CHRIS DAFOE Western Arts Correspondent

Vancouver -- She is there every day, usually flanked by a female bodyguard who, when it's time to leave, briefs her on where autograph seekers are.

And there is always a steady stream of fans. To support their heroine, a few diehard "Fumblers," as the most devoted call themselves, have braved all four weeks of courtroom testimony and ponderous legal argument.

Of course, he is there every day, too, a slight figure with a shaved head and a suit that seems a smidgen too big, taking copious notes and shaking his head in dismay when his talents are questioned.

The two may be adversaries, but they don't seem to take it too personally. They remain gracious, if a little chilly, toward each other and still have some friends in common.

Their dispute -- Neudorf v. Nettwerk et al -- has proved to be an unusual trial.

As well as all the fan and media attention, it has featured performances by a million-selling pop star, a lively bit of piano playing by her lawyer and some finger-snapping and singing by an expert witness. As one lawyer joked this week, it could all wind up on a bootleg CD entitled Sarah McLachlan: Unplugged and Under Oath.

But the most unusual thing about the civil trial over the songwriting and production credits on Ms. McLachlan's debut album may be that it's taking place at all. The case appears to be the first of its kind -- at least in North America.

So why exactly is a woman who has sold millions of recordings and created the highly successful Lilith Fair tour now packing them into Courtroom 44 instead of some hockey arena?

The answer seems to come down to three main factors: money, ego and the elusive question of what makes a song.

Given the implications for the music business, record companies, songwriters, publishers, pop stars and producers are waiting nervously to see how it all plays out. The case pits Ms. McLachlan and Nettwerk Productions, the independent record label that discovered her more than a decade ago, against Darryl Neudorf, a local producer and musician who claims he co-produced the album Touch, which has sold 650,000 copies around the world, and co-wrote four of its songs but hasn't been compensated or credited properly for his contribution.

Disputes over the authorship of songs are usually decided when the songs are written, not 11 years later. And they generally are settled long before any court date; record companies would rather write a cheque than face the expense and bad publicity that comes with a trial.

In this case, there have been several attempts at an out-of-court settlement since Mr. Neudorf filed his suit in 1995. In fact, mediation broke down just a week before the trial began.

Neither side will discuss details, but music-industry sources familiar with the situation say Nettwerk offered more than $100,000 to settle. However, Mr. Neudorf and his lawyer, Jonathan Simkin, were seeking around $400,000. (The current trial deals only with the issue of liability; any damage assessment would require a separate trial.)

The two sides couldn't agree on the value of either Mr. Neudorf's contributions or the copyrights in question. But there is also no love lost between Mr. Simkin and Terry McBride, who is both a founder of Nettwerk and Ms. McLachlan's manager.

Along with the Neudorf case, Mr. Simkin filed two other lawsuits against the company in 1995. One involved former members of the band MOEV and was settled out of court after the plaintiffs changed lawyers. The other, on behalf of Jeff Sawatsky, a bassist in Ms. McLachlan's first touring band who claims to have contributed lyrics to one of her songs, in scheduled for trial next November.

As well, Mr. Simkin wanted to call as an early witness James Parker, a Halifax musician turned television producer who played in a band with Ms. McLachlan when she was 17. He now claims her song Vox is based on one he wrote.

Mr. Parker wasn't allowed to appear (owing to insufficient notice and dubious relevance), but Mr. Simkin apparently hasn't had to look far for people unhappy with their treatment by Nettwerk.

The company, which Mr. McBride began with Mark Jowett and other music-business novices in a West Vancouver apartment in 1984, has grown into one of Canada's leading independent labels. Much of that growth took place in the late 1980s, the period under examination in the trial.

It's clear, both from evidence at the trial and griping in the local music community, that the transition created hurt feelings and left loose ends. Several witnesses have said the family feeling that marked Nettwerk's early years evaporated as the company began to focus more on the bottom line and the top of the charts. Mr. Neudorf said he wasn't offered a written contract setting out his producer's royalty until more than four years after Ms. McLachlan's album Touch was released.

But if money and ego dragged the dispute into court, the case itself may be decided on an even more interesting issue.

Beyond the competing versions of what went on in the back of Nettwerk's Vancouver offices, where the two musicians did six weeks of preproduction in early 1988, lie some tricky questions: What makes a song a song? And when exactly does a song become a song?

The answers would be simple if all songs were written the old-fashioned way, with someone sitting down at a piano and pounding out a bouncy-bouncy C while someone else wrote lyrics on a pad of legal paper. Copyright laws, devised in the era of sheet music and updated only recently, were designed with that kind of composition in mind.

Many songs are still written that way. But the introduction of multitrack recording and technology such as samplers and sequencers, as well as the rise of the record producer as a creative force, have blurred the line between composition and production.

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, known for such hits as Young Blood, Yakety Yak and Jailhouse Rock, summed up the change nicely in the late 1950s when they said, "We don't write songs, we write records." Things have grown even more complicated in the four decades since.

Ms. McLachlan and Mr. Neudorf blurred the line more than most. Before being signed by Nettwerk in 1987, she had never written a song and was trying to pull together material for an album when she was joined by Mr. Neudorf in January, 1988.

Mr. Neudorf says he was hired to help her get those songs. Nettwerk and Ms. McLachlan maintain he was hired to record demos and prepare for the actual sessions.

Either way, his work -- crafting drum-machine patterns, working out musicians' parts, devising arrangements -- and her songwriting took place in the same place and at the same time. In his mind, what he did crossed over into songwriting. In her mind, it did not.

Trying to figure out who's right 11 years later is like unscrambling an egg -- as is trying to put a value on a collaborative process.

If everyone from the producer to the record-company guy who makes a suggestion about a song is to be considered a co-writer, won't songwriting credits start to look like the thank-you list on a rap album? Is changing one chord enough to make a difference? If a guitar hook is songwriting, what about a drum pattern, such as James Brown's much-sampled Funky Drummer? And as technology allows songs to be taken apart and put back together in the studio, right up to the moment they are mixed and mastered, perhaps every producer deserves a co-writing credit.

How will it all turn out? Despite recent changes, the Copyright Act is still rooted largely in the world of Irving Berlin and the bouncy-bouncy C, so it's hard to say.

The trial was supposed to wrap up on Tuesday, but now will run through next week, with testimony from Mr. McBride, Mr. Jowett and Touch producer Greg Reely.

In the end, Mr. Justice Bruce Cohen of the B.C. Supreme Court (who is hearing the case without a jury) will have to decide whether the issue is copyright, as Mr. Simkin argues, or a contract to provide services, as Ms. McLachlan's lawyer, Jennifer Conkie, has suggested.

Until then, all the record companies, songwriters, publishers, pop stars and producers will wait eagerly -- and nervously. Remember, they don't call it the "music business" for nothing.

WHAT THE EXPERTS SAID

Both sides in the trial hired expert witnesses to prepare reports. The reports have come under sharp attack (14 pages of the plaintiff's were ruled inadmissible), but the choice of experts and their approach to songwriting neatly sum up the dilemma at the heart of the case. For him: Darryl Neudorf's lawyers called Gerald Eskelin, a California musicologist and choir leader who has testified in high-profile plagiarism suits on behalf of such stars as Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and John Fogerty.

In support of Mr. Neudorf's claim, Dr. Eskelin offered an expansive, holistic view of what and who make a song. If you put two people in a room long enough and they come out with songs, he suggested, it follows that they are co-writers.

That would be true, he said, even if one person's suggestion never made it into the song, since it helped direct the creative process.

Dr. Eskelin argued against the traditional view that songs are made up of only lyrics, melody and chords. An instrumental passage -- say, the guitar hook in the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction -- might be as important to the listener's enjoyment and the song's success as the melody or the chorus.

He also took issue with Sarah McLachlan's view that arranging includes ordering a pop song's various elements -- verse, chorus, bridge, solo -- stating that arranging doesn't begin until that order has been fixed. For her: If Gerald Eskelin approaches the problem musicologically, treating the song as a complete entity, veteran West Coast musician Bill Henderson tackles it from the perspective of the music industry, translating elements of the songs into numbers.

Mr. Henderson has written hundreds of songs in his 30 years in the music business, most prominently as a member of The Collectors and Chilliwack.

His report argues that a song's basic building blocks are lyrics, melody and chords, which are arranged into verses, a chorus, bridges and breaks.

He assumes that lyrics are always worth 50 per cent of a copyright -- and Sarah McLachlan's lyrical contributions are not an issue in the trial. Thus, he concludes that even if everything Mr. Neudorf says is true, he is entitled to no more than 20 per cent of any of the songs.

Whatever contributions Mr. Neudorf made, Mr. Henderson says, could be considered part of his job as a producer. He notes that, for all of his work with the Beatles, George Martin never asked for songwriting credit along with John Lennon and Paul McCartney.