Introduction

Two interrelated issues are woven through the chapters in this volume. The first is the issue of institutional design: how should we structure the institutions that make international intellectual property law? To address this issue, we must ask such key questions as who should be invited to participate in the system; what norms, rewards, and ideals determine their incentives; what resources are they given; and what goals do they seek? The second issue relates directly to the goals of the international intellectual property system – in particular, we must decide what mix of efficiency and distributive goals we want the system to pursue. These two issues are interrelated because institutional design determines whether specified goals can be met; the output of any institutional process is very much related to the process itself. We must therefore consider how we can design institutions to ensure a good match between institutional capabilities and institutional goals.

As many of the contributions to this volume suggest, distributive issues are embedded in decisions about the provision of public goods, including decisions about the provision of public knowledge goods on a global basis. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: because intellectual property systems use markets to allocate access to intellectual property, how might policymakers design intellectual property systems to ensure that those who lack the wherewithal to use the market have access to knowledge goods?