Competitive opportunities within many industries will be shaped by contemporary policy choices regarding the scope of protections offered to intellectual property by the institutions of patent, trade secret, and copyright. These issues have been in the 1990s the subject of much controversy in the United States, the world's leader in software innovation and expression. Information is the primary product of the world economy, and the intellectual property policy toward it is controversial because new technol- ogies open unprecented capabilities in generating and managing it. Debate and controversy aimed at striking the right balances between protection of and access to information have been heated in the industrial democracies in the l990s. Institutionalizing the right scope of intellectual property protec- tion for information strikes at the core of the contemporary economics of capitalism and the politics of democracy in this information age.
Citizens seek more information, pre- sented more usefully and at lower cost.
The governments of the world are challenged to make policies that achieve all these outcomes through the creation of the right mix of policies. Because new technologies are making the opportunities of bioengineering no longer fantastic, establishing the proper scopes of patent protection for bioengineered innovations is a seminal challenge for the world's policymakers. Striking the right balances is yet again the challenge of intellectual property lawmaking. The new knowledge diplomacy is being conducted in a context of cooperation on international trade policy with nearly universal state partic- ipation. And the goals of knowledge diplomacy are ambitious, which further complicates negotiations and trade arrangements.