Perlindungan Hukum bagi Konsumen terhadap Periklanan yang Menyesatkan

Abstract

 Advertisement is a medium mostly used to relate a business practitioner and the consumers. To the businessman, advertisement is a facility to introduce his product(s) to the customers while to the consumers, advertisement is a source of information to choose and/or to buy the product(s) the meets their needs and they can afford. But in practice, most businessman still treat advertisement only as their media of promotion to increase the selling of their products by ignoring the rights of consumers to know the truth and accuracy of information found in the advertisement. The existence of this misleading advertisement has a potential to inflict loss to the consumers, even it can result in casualty if it is not improved and controlled well. Based on the above condition, several problems can be formulated such as: first, why the regulation on advertising activity in law especially on advertisement is needed and what factors make business practitioners produce advertisement misleading the consumers; second, what measurement is used to decide whether an advertisement can be categorized as misleading consumers and how active roles of government, community and advertising business association can protect consumers from the broadcasting of various misleading advertisements; third, what the responsibility of the businessmen for broadcasting the advertisement misleading consumers and how the dispute in consumers of advertisement is solved. To answer these research problems, a normative juridical study with qualitative approach and a legal comparative method comparing legal certainty and court/legal practices in developed countries such as the United States were conducted. The data for this study were obtained through library research to get primary, secondary and tertiary legal materials and structured interview with interview guideline. The result of study reveals that: first, the importance of regulating advertising activity in law especially on advertisement is based on the existence of legislation on  consumer's protection which has not yet been able to protect the consumers from the misleading advertisement. It become worse because of the behavior of businessman who always broadcast the misleading advertisement because of the absence of law especially on advertisement, inter-businessman destructive competition, legal culture of consumers without critical attitude, no strict legal sanction for violation of rule, less coordination between related agencies and stagnating control function. Second, the standard in deciding a misleading advertisement I based on the existence of material fact of good and/or services and the influence of the advertisement on consumer that the consumers make mistake in choosing and/or buying the product. In addition, to prevent the violation of stipulation on advertisement, supervision and control are implemented by government agencies, community, consumer's protection institutions and business practitioner association. But, the function of supervision and control itself still faces the constraints of the overlapping authority of each institution, lack coordination and the other technical constraints. Third, the advertisers including the advertising company and media is mainly responsible for the misleading information the advertises, therefore, their responsibility can be asked in terms of criminal, civil and state administration procedures. Then, the attempt taken to solve the dispute of advertisement consumers can be done in peace based on deliberation for consensus or through the mechanism of formal court. Based on the result of this study, it is suggested that: first, the attempts pioneered by Badan Pembinaan Hukum Nasional need to be followed up to form a law especially regulating the advertisement activity which has stagnated. Second, the standard measurement of misleading advertisement needs to be improved by paying good attention to development of advertisement activities and practices of advertising supervision applied in the developed countries. Third, the function of supervision and control implemented by the government, community and the business practitioners should be improved to prevent the spread of misleading information through advertisement. Fourth, critical attitude and culture in paying attention to the advertisement broadcasted need to be cultivated among the community and the business practitioners should be educated to realize that advertisement is not only a facility to promote their product but also to sharpen the mind of community.