MKMC.5101 Communications Ethics and Regulations
Marketing professionals can, and must improve their ability to make better marketing and business decisions by understanding the legal and the ethical dimensions behind those decisions. By making more informed decisions, legal and ethical missteps can be avoided. This course reviews the main legal problems of the marketer in a context that considers the history and importance of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (how it is interpreted and applied to mass media in the United States, the protection of intellectual property, theories behind regulation of certain media and the U.S. Supreme Court's role as the "court of last resort". This course provides an opportunity to explore the ethical dimensions of human communication with respect to interpersonal, public, and mass communication. It emphasizes normative ethics in communication studies with specific application to personal and professional venues. This course is designed to sharpen students' awareness of key legal principles, legal reasoning, and ethical standards by which actions are judged in the workplace. This course is not designed to transform students into attorneys, paralegals, ethicists or research scholars, but to provide an appreciation of the issues and to provide a paradigm for their analysis. Various learning methods are used in this course, including in-class lectures, readings, discussion of current events, case analysis and discussion, and real world case analysis. By the end of this course, students should be able to (a) discuss issues of media law and ethics critically, including contract law, intellectual property and advertising law, (b) to find and use legal materials, (c) to spot issues of media law and ethics when faced with common situations as a marketer, (d) develop an ethical basis for making marketing decisions, (e) understand the historical, theoretical, legal and societal contexts within which marketing practitioners work.