Things began to change after the 1994 formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This global system adopted effective mechanisms to enforce its highly protectionist provisions on intellectual property rights (IPR). An international legal infrastructure was gradually built which, combined with strong diplomatic pressures and economic threats, started to turn the tide for copyrights holders.
In the Philippines, a turning point occurred in 1998, when Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates visited President Fidel Ramos.19 Gates offered to recognize as legal copies all Microsoft products installed in government computers. In return, Ramos promised to enforce copyright laws, now that government copies were “legal”. The U.S. still needed to direct a whole series of economic, political and diplomatic pressures at the administrations that followed Ramos', but the days of software abundance in the Philippines appeared to be numbered.
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