다단계판매의 개념 및 판단기준에 대한 고찰

A Study on the Definition and Criterion of Multi-Level Marketing

Door-to-door sales etc Act (DDSA) which stipulates door-to-door sales, phone soliciting sales, multi-level marketing (MLM), continuous transaction, and business soliciting transaction was fully revised in 2002. The current DDSA defines as follows; (1) to join membership of the salesperson at multiple levels (requiring at least three levels of salesperson) (2) the second level of salesperson has to be a consumer who buy a good from the first level of salesperson (3) whether salesperson can get retail profits or induce about it. According to this definition, it can be considered as providing of economic advantage (retail profit and support allowance) to salesperson for their sales and recruitment activities. Also, the supreme court stated that people were induced to become salesperson through a share of retail profits and support allowance for product sale and the recruitment of salespersons and this same process was cumulatively repeated over three or more levels, even if the payment of support allowance was not affected by the sales quantities of lower-level salesperson not directly under oneself. However, the illegal MLM companies have not generated their profit from normal business activities. The company has not focused on the consumers who have an experience to use their goods to recruit salesperson. If the company is able to adjust its processing the recruitment of salesperson, it does ot belong to MLM. Accordingly, it can csose unfair results that those illegal MLM companies can not be regulated or punished for its illegitimated MLM activities. It is the key reason that the definitionnnnnnLM is relatively unclear in current DDSA, because the most controversial part nnnDDSA Article 2, Nn.5 is 'retail profit' and 'the consumers nnnfinms (a), in whole or in part'. So, it is necessary to make it complete to regulate effectively. This study aims to inquire into several problems of the MLM regulations in Korean DDSA and to find the amendment of the definition of MLM in DDSA.