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Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation, and the future of the Internet. Each of these involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms and conditions under which the public receives access, and to determine how the infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time. This book pays much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy. Economics has become the methodology of choice for many scholars and policymakers in these areas. The book offers a rigorous economic challenge to the prevailing wisdom, which focuses primarily on problems associated with ensuring adequate supply. The book explores a set of questions: what drives the demand side of the equation, and how should demand-side drivers affect public policy? Demand for infrastructure resources involves a range of important considerations that bear on the optimal design of a regime for infrastructure management. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant management problems that recur across many different fields and many different resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach to understanding and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.

India’s post-TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) patent law reforms, which incorporates a remarkable array of flexibilities is seen as a counter-harmonization measure in direct opposition to the dominant model of patent law pioneered by the United States. India’s response, which represents an alternative model of confirming to the TRIPS Agreement, has seen stiff resistance in the form of counter-provisions in Free Trade Agreements entered by the US and other countries. Historically, patent systems based on neo-liberalism, like the American model, favour individual pursuits whereas patent systems based on social democracy, like the Indian model, focus on community goals. This distinction manifests in the manner in which the role of the public is defined in the patent system. India’s model is characterized by the emphasis on the public elements in three significant ways. First, in redefining pre-grant opposition by allowing public participation in questioning the ex ante validity of patents. Second, in protecting the public domain by heightening the standard of patentability and requiring the patent applicant to demonstrate technical advance and greater effectiveness of the invention. Third, in providing for compulsory licensing when the public interest is affected by a patent that is not worked locally. The influence of the India’s model has come from mimicry by other countries in following the Indian example. Countries like Argentina, Philippines, Brazil, China, and South Africa have either emulated or strongly favour following India’s path. Such state practices might occasion the reimagination of the TRIPS Agreement as the Access Regime.