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Intellectual property is becoming one of the most valuable and powerful assets in the increasingly privatized global economy. Globalization, technological advances, the Internet and e-commerce have made intellectual property (IP) infringements an escalating and pervasive issue in both developed countries such as the US and developing countries/regions such as Taiwan and mainland China. However, due to local interests, agency priorities, different levels of economic development and different enforcement structures, the US, Taiwan and mainland China enforce the similar IP laws on the books very differently in action. First, this paper intends to portrait a general picture of IPR enforcement mechanisms in the US, Taiwan and mainland China, and to estimate the proportions of IPR infringements handled by three major enforcement systems: the criminal judicial system, the civil judicial system and the administrative system. Then it focuses the attention on criminal judicial systems specifically. It analyzes the different roles criminal courts play in handling IPR infringements in the three regions. The different roles of criminal courts include: to facilitate governmental policies, to enforce the criminal law, to protect the fairness of the system, to punish or to deter serious infringers, and to bring compensation to victims. The study implicates that apart from conventional jurisprudential wisdom, criminal courts could serve vastly different functions in handling economic crimes in countries/regions with different political regimes, legal structures and cultures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global legal community has been increasingly concerned with whether globalization has altered the ways that national courts interpret local norms. What is more important is perhaps its consequence. Has the local use of transnational norms served the interests of local citizens? Would a growing use of transnational norms broaden our concept of citizenship? If transnational norms are rejected, would it entail "less" citizenship or would it in effect construct a stronger "national" citizenship? And there exists a question of legitimacy. The debates between Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court become all too familiar. Similarly, when the Taiwanese Constitutional Court first cited foreign decisions, a dissenting opinion issued strong warnings of the danger in judicial borrowing that might hinder local progress of rule of law and undermine national sovereignty. This paper seeks to analyze local use of transnational norms by a comparative study on three courts: U.S. Supreme Court, Supreme Court of Canada, and the Taiwanese Constitutional Court. They are chosen to represent various attitudes: conservative (U.S.), progressive (Canada), post-democratic progressive (Taiwan). It compares the ways three courts articulate and adopt transnational norms and inquire whether their differences in legal system, constitutional progress, concept of citizenship and national community, or even global political economic position have relationships with their difference in embracing transnational norms. A particular focus would be placed upon a question of whether and to what extent the recent local use of transnational norms departs from an earlier colonial image of legal transplantation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]