There are many variants, within utilitarianism, of utility which are recognized and used as the basis of policy making. The one that has been considered here is the principle of wealth maximization through creation of incentives, by institutions, for the efficient or optimal use of intellectual resources. In utilitarian philosophy each person's utility or preference is to count equally with the utility or preference of others. This necessarily entails interpersonal comparisons. The dilemma is how to move from individual welfare to a criterion of social choice where each community's or group's welfare is counted as equal. In order to avoid

interpersonal comparisons of utility, some thinkers substitute efficiency as the sole criterion of social choice, efficiency being easily measurable in terms of output, production, cost-benefit analysis and so on. The general difficulty that exists in interpersonal comparisons is that the principle of utilit-y requires the maximization of utilities across all individuals and no standards exist of comparing the utility of one person with that of the other.

This often presents a normative issue for Utilitarian analysis which has been often critiqued for ignoring how utility or welfare is distributed across society. Even if one were to discard the more abstract criterion of 'welfare' and take efficiency as the sole criterion for determining the efficacy of IP rights, the problem of the standard of utility employed to compare efficiency of one firm (for one category of good/s) with