Music pirating is so entrenched in Cameroon that it is unlikely to ever be eradicated.

In fact, pirating is so prevalent in the country that legitimate stores and hawkers sell openly pirated CDs.

The CDs come shrink-wrapped, complete with slick pictures of artists "burnt" on them and cost as little as FCFA 500. Yet, despite the incredibly low price and packaging, the CD is most likely a pirated copy. The pirates are so good, hardly anyone can tell the difference.

Every musician in Cameroon gets almost no income from CD sales, even though thousands of their CDs might be sold. Because, as soon as a CD is made, the pirates pick it, copy it and are on the street, offering them for less than a fraction of the retail price. The legitimate CDs all but vanish.

The pirated CD hawkers say they make enormous gains since the authentic CDs are very expensive, sometimes costing as much as FCFA 3000. Having procured a pirated CD for FCFA 250 and selling it at FCFA 500, a hawker, therefore, nets 100 percent profit.

One other dealer said he can buy CDs for FCFA 40,000 and sell them in less than a week.

Dealers in pirated CDs say they source the counterfeit from Douala Central Market, Baffoussam and some people who own computers.

Nonetheless, it is not all raking in the profits. A dealer based in Buea said "even though we have these benefits, we also encounter a lot of problems with the police and the Cameroon music society, which often seize the CDs, especially those composed by Cameroonians."

Sometimes, some of the pirated CDs do not play well which is a big problem between the pirates and their customers.The dealer added that they always try to dodge the police and the Cameroon music society. But whenever they are caught, they have to cough up as much as FCFA 60,000 and the CDs are destroyed.

At times though, said the dealer, they bribe the police or Cameroon music society; so they avoid going to jail and having the CDs destroyed or just confiscated.Consumers of pirated music and movie CDs have come to believe that dubbing and selling someone else's music are totally acceptable.

That is quite nice for consumers, really bad for record companies and retailers but terrible for artists.Most of the consumers say that things are hard and they cannot afford to buy a CD at FCFA 3000 when they can pick one cheaply, for a mere FCFA 500. But some people think that since the pirates deprive artists of well-deserved incomes, they should be severely punished.

Others said the police and the Cameroon music society should be held responsible because they receive money from the pirates and encourage them to go on with the illicit practice.

The copyright pirates don't stop at CDs only. They do books, too.When The Post accosted the police to comment on the piracy of copyrights generally, a policeman attached to the Mobile Intervention Unit, GMI, Roger Mefiri, said they caught a suspect in Mutengene with a carton of pirated exercise books and some primary text books.

Mefiri said the books most probably came from Nigeria although the suspect claimed that they came from Douala.The police officer said the pirates copy letter heads to print on papers which look like the originals.

He said they are trying to establish how the pirates come into possession of the letter heads; whether it is with the connivance of the book companies or the pirates fabricate the letter heads themselves.

The Post also spoke to the Registrar of the Buea High Court, Grace Kwalar, who said they have never handled any case of piracy in Buea.She said she believed that most of such cases are solved at the level of the police.