A Rough Guide to Global Intellectual Property Pluralism

Almost everyone can agree that the original connection of intellectual property to trade was for purely economically instrumental purposes but few would have predicted its other consequences, particularly the reshaped relationship of intellectual property’s innovation mandate to the production of other public goods. A pluralism lens may sharpen our focus of how and when private means facilitated by intellectual property meet appropriate publicly-defined global governance ends such as development. It can expose the multiplicity of forces - the newer actors, directions and domains - within global intellectual property that still lodge ultimate accountability in the public policy decisions of individual states and intergovernmental organizations. Just as significantly, global intellectual property pluralism can contribute to a more accurate normative understanding of what is occurring on the international plane where regulation of knowledge goods increasingly takes place, particularly its effects on the least advantaged among us. This chapter - in an edited volume to be published by Oxford University Press in 2010 - provides a rough guide to this sociolegal approach to intellectual property