Globalization of marketing in the MSC: Some legal challenges

It is needless to say that since the appearance of the United Nation’s Charter of 1945 the world had been divided into three worlds. The First is the free world, the Second is the communist world and the Third is the developing or non-aligned nations. This situation had dominated the world’s political landscape until the end of the cold war in the late 1980s. by that time, the former Soviet Union proclaimed its reforming policy ‘Perestroika’ to restructure its economy. At the same time senior Bush of the First world proclaimed the concept of the New World order. As a result, most of the countries have opted for a combination of democracy and market economy. This has created the concept of globalization, or becoming or making worldwide. On the other hand, in the era of the information technology and in response to the new economic system Malaysia has been creating its smart project, the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) taking advantage of the concept of globalization that experienced by the world. Seven flagship applications had been projected in the corridor. One of these has been the Borderless Marketing Centers whereby four areas of multimedia applications had been identified. In other words, it has globalized marketing in the MSC. The proposition of this paper is that although such a process of globalization generates opportunities to Malaysia it may also generate some legal challenges to it as well. Globalization of marketing has provided Malaysian and international companies with the opportunity to operate in an environment of close operation in the multimedia industry in a manner that defies time zone, physical borders, national interests, etc. However, this also imposes practical legal challenges such as to the rules of the conflict of laws, obscenity and pornography, copyright, privacy among others. This paper presents some of the possible legal challenges resulted from the globalization of marketing in the MSC and tries to propose some counter solutions to such challenges. With the hope that opportunities of globalization of marketing in the MSC and other political, economic and social challenges will be tackled by other papers.