As copyright enforcement began in earnest, compact discs (CDs), video CDs (VCDs) and digital video discs (DVDs) were introduced in the 1990s and early 2000s. For a while, the industry managed to prevent copying and to restrict the use of DVDs by geographical region. However, this was eventually thwarted by a combination of dedicated hacking, the technical savvy of rising industrial giant China, and plain consumer freedom of choice.
The Philippine case is probably typical: When illegal CD/VCD/DVD discs began to circulate, rumors spread that these discs could damage the disc player itself. The original U.S.-, Europe- or Japan-made players were so expensive that owners would not risk damage from discs of unknown quality. So those who bought original players stuck to expensive original discs and suffered under the ridiculous geographic restrictions (e.g., DVDs sent home by U.S.- or Middle East-based relatives were unreadable, and players they sent or brought home could not play local DVDs.)
Enters China. Cheap DVD players that could play discs from any geographic region and priced at one-fifth or less of their competitors flood the Asian market, including the Philippines. Another rumor - perhaps apocryphal - circulates: that original DVDs may damage these players. Between China-made machines that played cheap unauthorized discs and branded players that played only high-priced discs that were also geographically-challenged, it was a no-contest. With the further entry of low-cost CD/DVD burners, duplicating these read-only discs became trivial.
So Asia remains a flourishing market of China-made DVD players and unauthorized CD/DVDs, creating a new abundance of cultural fare for Asians. Many of the DVDs are adult material or otherwise of doubtful cultural value. But most regular movies are available too, and, increasingly, movie classics and truly educational collections of documentaries from the Discovery, National Geographic, and similar cable channels; software, too. In some countries, the materials are made more accessible to ordinary people through translations into the local language.
To suppress the new abundance, special government police and private detectives from the U.S. regularly conduct surprise raids not only against the disc vendors and distributors, but also against businesses, schools, computer shops and Internet cafes that use unauthorized software. These highly disruptive raids have driven CD/DVD and software copying underground, where it flourishes unabated thanks to cheap China-made disc burners.20
In the U.S., another round of efforts against unauthorized copying was launched under the banner of digital rights management (DRM), consolidating counter-productive technological and legal measures for finer-grained control of copying and access to materials in digital media and on the Internet. DRM includes content encryption, digital signatures, digital fingerprinting, digital watermarks, digital serial numbers built into CPUs and computer mother boards, and miscellaneous authentication systems. They involve such concepts as conditional access systems, remote revocation of use-rights, and other means to ensure that scarcity and abundance remain under tight corporate control. They may be aptly called digital use restriction technologies (DURTs), after their genetic counterparts for controlling seed reproduction, the GURTs.
The U.S. remains ahead in DURTs and GURTs developments, having the most corporate interests to protect, especially in the information sector. The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyrights Act (DMCA) now mandates and protects DURTs themselves, making it illegal to construct devices that bypass or disable these technologies. Citizens' groups in the U.S. like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge are concerned about the impact of DRM and the DMCA on privacy, political freedoms, and human rights.21
The increasing availability of high-quality free/open source software. however, has pulled the rug under the argument that creativity can only be encouraged by granting creators statutory monopolies through IPRs.
In the information and agriculture sectors, the see-saw between abundance and scarcity, between markets and commons, continues through skirmishes in the technology front, in the legal arena, and of course in the market.