가맹점 창업자 보호에 관한 법적 검토 -부당한 위약금에 대한 규제를 중심으로-

One of the main issues regarding protection of franchisee has been that of franchise chain profit to maintain the business so far. However, as you can see in the suicidal case of a young franchise chain owner, it is revealed that there is a agreement between the franchisor and a franchisee that a chain owner has to pay a large amount of cancellation charge to terminate the franchise agreement sooner than the agreed upon date due to sluggish business, which seriously undermines franchisee’s freedom to close business. To address the issue, this thesis is to review the necessity of reasonable adjustment of cancellation charge based on the idea that the contract imposing heavy cancellation charge can harm equivalent interest of two parties of the franchise business, especially when it comes to protection of franchisee. First of all, I will briefly go over regulations to protect franchisee in the Korean franchise business act, analyze limitations of the regulations, and point out room for revision of the regulations to protect franchisees who are the economical weak, in spite of principle of private autonomy, as I describe the legal nature of the article regarding unreasonable cancellation charge. In particular, in case where the contract is significantly unfair by, for example, including expected profit loss to the cancellation charge, even though the contract is between the two parties, there should be protection over franchisee by guaranteeing their freedom to close business even with premature termination of franchise contract.