통신판매중개업자의 책임

초록

Due to the unprecedented situation of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, non-face-to-face transactions are increasing day by day. Most of the online sales of goods and services are performed on the platform, and thus the position of the platform operator is greatly strengthened. In the platform economy, it is even more so because there is a characteristic that more users flock to platforms with large users(it is called cross network externality). A platform operator falls under the Act on the Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce as a mail order broker (Article 20, Paragraph 2). Recently, the Supreme Court has decided to include mail order brokers under in “persons who sell publications” (Article 22 of the Publishing Industry Promotion Act), one of the offenders of the fixed book price system under the 「Publishing Industry Promotion Act」 (Supreme Court 2019. 9. 10. 2019Ma5464 decision). For this reason, if a seller who sells books in an open market after signing a contract for use with an online platform that is an open market sells books in violation of the fixed price system, the platform operator that is an open market was liable for the violation. In this paper, the issue was raised after analyzing the above Supreme Court's decision and other decisions in similar cases. Next, the duties and responsibilities of mail order brokers under the Act on the Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce were analyzed along with those of the Full Amendment to the Act on the Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce. Then, when books subject to the fixed price system are sold on the platform operated by the mail order broker, I argued whether the mail order broker can be regarded as a publication seller, and refuted the rationale for the decision in detail. The conclusion of the Supreme Court decision, that is, the conclusion that the mail order broker bears the responsibility as a publication seller under the Publishing Industry Promotion Act, should be limited only to this case and should not be a precedent in the future. Due to the strengthening of the status of online platform operators, the problem of abuse of their market dominance has been raised worldwide, and there is a consensus that consumer damage is increasing. However, I do not think that it is not possible to take advantage of this trend and extend Article 22 of the Publishing Industry Promotion Act to include mail order brokers who are not parties to the contract for book sales in this case.

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