Imagine my surprise on buying a copy of Pink Floyd's album The Wall when I entered China six weeks ago, to find that the song name Comfortably Numb had somehow been translated into Come Fartably Numb. And my amusement turned to despair once I discovered that only one of the two discs actually worked. Twelve yuan not so well spent. This was my introduction to the cheap but dubious world of China's CD pirates.

Since arriving here, the problem of illegal CDs and DVDs in this country has appeared alarmingly big, from a foreign music buyer's point of view. I would like to illustrate what I see as some of the problems, and a potential short-term solution. While reference here is mainly to CDs, the same sentiments apply to DVDs.

For those unfamiliar with pirated (illegal) merchandise, it is merchandise of wildly varying quality that sells for as low as a third of the price of their legal counterparts. It is an economic problem (in any country) primarily because of intellectual property laws, meaning that the artists of the music never get paid royalties for the sales of their work. Intellectual property laws have been under intense scrutiny in the West for years, especially after the highly publicized court battles of the American music-swapping website Napster in the 1990s.

So we must ask: Why are people buying illegal CDs, especially when only about half of them work in the CD player (at least in mine)? The first reason is the abovementioned price—often a mere 12 yuan for a double CD. Also, equally significantly, the range of legal Western CDs here is very limited. If the range of illegal CDs is small (which it is), the range of legal CDs is smaller. What I mean by "range" is mainly in terms of musical genre; loosely, there's only about six genres to choose from (that I've seen)—R & B, classical, musicals, jazz, soundtracks and pop. The West has dozens of genres and sub-genres, a veritable musical smorgasbord. And the third reason the illegal industry is large is that, ironically, it's presumably good for the local economies, especially with the regular influx of Westerners into the areas.

I will definitely not be so bold as to say that I have a solution, but Australia has employed a tactic against piracy that appears to be working. I have no idea if the concept below is being implemented in China, but if not, it could be up for consideration.

Piracy is also rampant in the West, and some steps have been taken to counter this widespread and unfortunately socially acceptable problem. One of these actions was that the government introduced a levy on blank cassette tapes and CDs, on the assumption that they would be used for piracy. This levy—around 5 percent of the cassette's/CD's cost price—would be paid into the music royalty collection society in Australia, APRA, and the money would go to the respective artists from there. Perhaps, instead of closing down the pirated merchandise stores here in China, simply make them pay a levy analogous to this? Simply closing the stores, as far as I can tell, would hurt the local economies more than benefit them. The levy is certainly not a long-term solution, but it could be beneficial for both retailers and artists for maybe two to five years while a more concrete solution is reached. And a solution will eventually be reached that benefits everyone. For instance, even Napster is now legitimate.

The problem of a limited CD range is harder to solve. There are hundreds of Western artists that I feel the Chinese public would enjoy, but simply can't find. And it's always a novelty for a visiting (or residing) Westerner to find the official Chinese versions of their favorite albums. Being a newcomer in China, I can't say much about the CD range, for I understand that the channels to officially release a CD here are more rigorous than in Australia (I could be wrong). But the need for a larger legal range of Western CDs and DVDs is glaring.

In all, I don't have immediate solutions to this problem. How do you change widespread social attitudes that are currently profitable? How do you sate the tastes of the visiting or residing Westerners? How do you forge a royalty-collection system in a country of over a billion people? I don't know, but I'll leave you with this thought—give me the official version of a CD over a badly translated, inferior quality, 12 yuan gamble any day.

The author is an Australian music journalist, currently teaching in Wuhan, Hubei Province