I. The Turmoil Over Intellectual Property Property rights form the basis of a market system. In the past decade they have become a major topic of dispute (Business Week, 1989). The main forms intellectual property takes are patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets. In looking to resolve the mounting trade deficits and the apparent erosion of American competitiveness in many areas over the past decades, both the U.S. Government and business enterprises are accusing many foreign countries and enterprises of theft of intellectual property and are insisting in fora such as The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (Emmert, 1990; Maskus, 1993) on a new global accord on property rights (Siebeck, 1990; Pearson, 1992). Since the 1960s the global economy has been undergoing a rapid transformation (Oster, 1990). Developments in electronics, basic materials, biogenetics and other fields have produced a dazzling array of new products as well as business processes. In addition the dawn of the age together with new forms of transportation have stimulated a global integration of the world's regional economies on an unprecedented scale. In almost every sector of the economy, competition is now global in all functional areas: production, marketing, finance, human resources and information systems. At the same time the various economic regions of the world remain rooted in their historical and cultural traditions, specifically with respect to property, price mechanisms and economic justice. The result is that people face an increasingly global economy that lacks a global foundation on fundamental issues such as property rights, which undergird trade and development (Wallerstein, 1993). It is particularly alarming that many of the problems are arising in capitalist countries, where presumably a primary role of the State is to protect property rights (Benko, 1987). That many States -- such as Brazil, India, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan -- have challenged the operative (Western) international understanding of property rights means nothing less than that they are redefining property rights and the relations of property owners to society (Hoffman, 1990). That is, they are redefining the rights of shareholders as well as of all other stakeholders in a business enterprise. In a controversial survey of the top 500 U.S. industrial enterprises, the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) estimated the loss to American industry from all of these sources to be in the range of $43 billion to $61 billion (USITC, 1988, pp. 4-3 to 4-9; Appendix One). The USITC explicitly recognizes the inability to generalize the survey findings due to problems of statistical methodology, yet it maintains that the findings are likely accurate for the restricted sample of respondents. Developing countries hotly contest the accuracy of this viewpoint because of the survey's self-reporting nature. As a result, intellectual property rights have become a major international business/society issue on both normative and empirical levels (Mason, 1986). The regulation of intellectual property poses special problems for two reasons. First, intellectual property possesses economic characteristics not found in tangible commodity property. It is readily divisible and transportable and can be easily appropriated by many parties at once. Secondly, intellectual property plays such a pivotal role in the development prospects of many countries that they cannot afford to be excluded from access to it. These issues have been the focus of the recent Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations -- initiated in 1986 and only concluded at the end of 1993 -- as well as of initiatives to forge international standards under the aegis of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). There are numerous points of contrast between United States policies and those of OECD countries, on the one hand, and with those of the developing countries, on the other (Brown and Rushing, 1990). …