Research On Actors Legal Liability For False Advertisements

Since China began its reform and opening up, our advertising industry has been developing very rapidly. Advertisement has permeated through every nook and cranny of our life. Nowadays, it has become a universal phenomenon for famous persons, experts and ordinary people to represent the spokesman of certain products or enterprises. According to economics and theories in the science of law, actors for false advertisements should bear certain legal liability. However, our existing legal provisions pay little attention to this, thus resulting in great controversy in judicial practice and theory. Owing to the fact that different types of actors play different roles in the influence of false advertisements, they should bear different legal liability. In addition, given the particularity of actors for false advertisements themselves, their legal liability only relates to civil legal liability and administrative legal liability. Therefore, it is necessary for us to divide the subject into different categories in order to make an accurate analysis and perfect the legal provisions on the actors' legal liability for false advertisements. To be more concrete, we should divide the actors into celebrity actors, expert actors and ordinary actors according to their different identities. We specify that the actors' legal liability for false advertisements should follow the principle of social rationalization, the principle of temperance, the principle of proportion as well as the principle of unity. According to the analysis of the actors' legal liability for false advertisements, we hold that the principle of responsibility for fault should be applied to celebrity actors for their act of tort. As for expert actors, they should share the tort liability with the advertising agent while the ordinary actors should not bear any civil legal liability. We should directly investigate and affix the responsibility of the subject concerned according to the Law Against Illicit Competition or the Law of Advertisements. The improvement of the actors' administrative legal liability for false advertisements would mainly be carried out from several aspects as follows.