Meta-tag Spam Declared Illegal in Germany

Philipp Lenssen writes "According to Heise.de, a German court ruled excessive use of meta-keywords in HTML unlawful. Meta-tag keywords may still be used if they are in strong relation to the page. The decision does not address more popular search engine spamming methods of today (as meta-keywords are ignored by Google, they are rarely used as core strategy for Search Engine Optimization)." <update> Thanks to Michael Mol for the translation to English pointer.

Comments

How can a court enforce the ruling

[stecoop]

Just because a court rules it's illegal doesn't mean the court will/can enforce the ruling. Case in point:
1) Who is going to search every web page to find incorrect meta tags
2) Who is going to decide that a given page has incorrect meta-keyword information
3) Define strong relation to a web page
4) Define Excessive use of meta-keywords in HTML
5) What about servers across national lines
6) Does anyone really use meta-keywords other than spammers

And no I couldn't RTFM in German - as you can see, the babelfish translation is so eloquent and can someone translate the keyword information in the linked page to determine if it's using excessive meta information:

meta NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Gericht: Suchmaschinen-Spamming per HTML-Metatags wettbewerbswidrig"

Court: Search machine Spamming by HTML Metatags competition-adversely

Manual-like listing of many hundred HTML Metatags without each contentwise connection to an InterNet side f?e to a manipulation of search machines and is competition adverse after. 1 of the law against the mean competition (UWG). That decided the regional court meal in a judgement from 26 May 2004 (Az. 44 0 166/03), ver?entlichten now. Kl?rin of the procedure was a rechtsf?ger trade association.

After the Ausf?ungen of the court f?t a such use from search words to the fact that the InterNet sides of the deplored ones when using search machines at one of the front places designated and accordingly by the users more h?iger frequented w?en. When using hundreds encyclopedia-like together to gereihten terms, which do not exhibit also by far Verst?nis connection to the goods and services offered on the sides, k?e it the operator any longer around do not go pr?ntieren its offer optimally. Rather lie? this only the conclusion too that thereby the technical Schw?en should be used by search machines, in order to provide with the search results a competition advantage.

This does not apply in opinion of the judges from meals however f?jede use of HTML Metatags. So m?e it a competitor accept, if a Website with search words am gef?t, in the broadest sense still in a connection for the performance of the operator stand. Same applies f?die use of names to erm?ichen Gesch?sbezeichnungen or marks, if this "component from on the InterNet side switched are advertising on the left of", in order the operator Gesch?e with advertising partner.

The decision of the LG meal extends the anyway v?ig non-uniform iurisdiction of German courts about HTML Metatags, with which it went so far particularly around the use of strange characteristics into the Metas, by a further problem field. A?liche decision for the use of irrelevant terms in Metatage had in the M? 2002 the LG D?eldorf met. The judgement had been waived however sp?r by the OLG D?eldorf. Whether against the decision from meals redresses are inserted, is not yet admits (Joerg Heidrich)/(tol/c't)

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[wikdwarlock]

Same argument as the CAN-SPAM act in the US. Writing a new law does not mean the referenced action is suddenly stopped or seriously reduced. It just makes legal penalties easier to prosecute after the fact.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

But in the US; laws arn't written by courts. The court can only set precidence.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[vi (editor)]

1) Who is going to search every web page to find incorrect meta tags

There will be enough people.
I don't know if this is a specialty of German law, but competitors (and special societies ? - but I think that got nuked) can "admonish" the violating party. The interesting thing is that they can demand the cost for this from the violating party.
There is quite a number of laywers making money with this and it can be e.g. pretty expensive for a German not to put his contact information on a (even partially) commercial website. And in one click range please !
No, this is not a joke.
This stuff will be enforced.

5) What about servers across national lines

From legal rulings it does only matter if you reside in Germany and /or have a business residing in Germany. I think your website must be (partially ?) directed to Germans, too, but I'm not sure about this. So, if you have a foot in Germany and make business with Germans then you have to obey this ruling.
And, yes, such stuff IS enforced when you have your webservers outside Germany etc.
You will be sued by the aforcementioned laywers or competitors.

As a rather funny sidenote it is illegal for German businesses to use to .ag domain unless they are stock compenies (AG = Aktiengesellschaft = stock company).

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Smidge204]

1) A webcrawler bot

2) The bot can search the page content and compare the keywords in the meta tag to the words in the page. One would think that a page with "watermelon" in the meta tag would at least mention it in the page itself...

3) Use statistical analysis on the page content. The more often the keyword appears in the page the stronger it's relation probably is.

4) Some pages have dozens and dozens of keywords in the meta tag. That's probably excessive... though to be fair you could adjust the allowed number of keywords based on the amount of content (within reason)

5) It's possible, within reason, to determine the physical location of a server if it's DNS information is properly maintained... and I think there are already laws about that.

6) Damned if I know, but all of this is strictly academic anyway, because you're assuming the police will be proactive in enforcing this law. As wikdwarlock said, it's just an extra "gotcha" when they catch you for something else.
=Smidge=

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Zocalo]

Who is going to search every web page to find incorrect meta tags

Since we are talking about Germany here, I have a good idea how this is actually going to "work". Does anyone remember the whole Adobe Illustrator / KIllustrator trademark fiasco? Germany has an odd system of trademark enforcement whereby lawfirms look for trademark infringements and bring suits, telling the entity whose trademark was infringed is optional - as happened with Adobe. Naturally the real winners are the lawfirms, many of whom are bottom feeders with dubious case selection and billing practices.

You could quite easily employ the same scheme here; the lawfirms "police" the sites and bring suits against those they believe infringe. If the court decides that they are right or the defendent settles before trial, then they make money. The problem is obviously that you are going to attract the same type of ambulance chasing lawyers to the business as the trademark example, but modern legislation hardly has a good track record for being sensible, does it?

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[nwbvt]

"1) Who is going to search every web page to find incorrect meta tags"

I suppose if they do a search on hotbot (or whatever still uses meta-tags) for "Immanuel Kant" and get in response pages with Cartman's mom getting pooed on, they will have found one to report. As meta tag abuse is only a problem if it is visible (meaning it makes it to the first few pages of search results), it doesn't really matter if some are hidden away and get missed.

" 2) Who is going to decide that a given page has incorrect meta-keyword information
3) Define strong relation to a web page
4) Define Excessive use of meta-keywords in HTML"

I don't know about in Germany, but here the courts are given the task of interpreting the law.

" 5) What about servers across national lines"

One would think this wouldn't affect them, but remember the Yahoo! Nazi auction case.

" 6) Does anyone really use meta-keywords other than spammers"

No. But this may be done under the hope that they could return to normal use if spammers are removed from the equation.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[sg_oneill]

The Joe Gutnick ruling in australia (american site sued in australia under australian laws for defamation. Since site can be read in australia, the court held that the defamation happened in australia) pretty much opens the door for jurastiction shopping around the world.

And just cos your country dont recognise that countries rules, doesnt mean that you aint gunna find your bank balance empty one day.

Welcome to legal hell.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

Lawyers or law firms are not allowed to sue independently. A client is required. There are strict rules about who can sue because of what. In cases of unethical business practices ("Unlauterer Wettbewerb"), the relevant law is 13 UWG (in German).

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly the same in Germany. This is a precedent.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Bingo Foo]

Courts can set precedents. However, by making references to clauses, whether real or imagined, in our state and federal constitutions, they do effectively write new laws.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[bgackle]

I didn't RTFA either for the same reason as the parent, but I'm going to comment anyway (perhaps we need a system of human translation by bi-lingual slashdotters in exchange for karma, mod-points, or free subscription page views). What we have here is a great example of a clumsy law being passed to solve a problem that the free market has already solved for itself. Most search engines ignore meta-tags already, presumably as a result of people abusing them to artifically boost their page ranking. The search engines themselves have a vested interest in defeating scams like this. People want relevant results from a search engine, so spamming of this sort reduces the value of those results. We don't need a clueless government trying to help solve the problem months or years after the fact. The time it takes for spammers to discover an exploit like this, abuse it, and have the search engines adjust their procedures to compensate is probably an order of magnitude less than the time it takes a piece of corrective legislation to be passed in pretty much any democratic system. Governments are by their very nature too slow and clumsy to solve problems of this nature.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

So this would allow the bottom feeding lawyers to attack the scamming scumbags? Sounds like a clear win for everyone that actually wants to use the internet.

Of course the lawyers will attack the wrong people and piss us all off in the real world, but it is nice to dream.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[pla]

One would think that a page with "watermelon" in the meta tag would at least mention it in the page itself...

Not a safe assumption. Let's say you write a page about Fermat's theorem... You might include the phrase "number theory" in the meta tags, but not mention it anywhere on the page itself. That would not count as either an oversight in the page text, nor a misuse of meta tags.


However, I have a somewhat strange thought on ways around the court's ruling... They only said that the meta tags need to fit the page's content. So what if the page specifically displays its own meta tags at the bottom? They would then match the page (even to a law-bot).

Overall, due to the vagueness and ease of circumvention, I would consider this a more-or-less meaningless ruling. It may provide a precedent for future tangentially-related trials, but I highly doubt we can apply it to the idea of spam-police going around searching for improper use of meta tags.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[KilljoyX]

2) The bot can search the page content and compare the keywords in the meta tag to the words in the page. One would think that a page with "watermelon" in the meta tag would at least mention it in the page itself...

What if the content itself is contained solely inside of a flash element. Bots do not search through content of that nature.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, lawyers are not allowed to sue. Lawyers' clients sue. The law explicitly forbids suing for the purpose of making money off the violation. If you attack others for not complying with the law and it is obvious that you are not interested in a betterment of the situation but only in the money, then your attack will backfire. There is precedent for this!

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame you didn't read the article. There is no law against HTML meta tags. The court (!) applied the "law against unfair competition" ("Gesetz gegen unlauteren Wettbewerb") to a situation on the Internet, and quite rightfully so, because the situation fits the law, even though the law wasn't made for the Internet. This ruling doesn't make the use of meta tags any more dangerous than some libel case makes self-publishing on the web dangerous.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[mcovey]

go to Kafene.org, my website. Check out the meta tags ;-) Maybe I'll be prosecuted.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[hendrik42]

1) The competitors of the Meta-Tag Spammer. Note that using false Meta-Tags is not illegal. Only if they are deliberately used by company A to gain an unfair advantage over company B, company B can sue company A into changing that meta-tag. Sounds like a good idea to me.

2) A court, on a case-by-case base using common sense. Actually, they way it works is that company B can send company A a letter (abmahnung, dissuasion) requesting them to stop their wrong-doing. If this letter costs company B some lawyers costs they can also demand reimbursement of about $1000. Afterwards company A can decide to remove their Meta-Tags and sign a paper that they will not reinstate them again or go into court with company B.

3-4) Common sense, it is really not hard to decide whether "Sex, P0rn, V1agra, MP3" are relevant for a dentist or not :-)

5) My guess is that it applies to all companies serving German customers.
6) Yes, me :-)

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Sethseekstruth]

Actually, you are overlooking a big part of german culture. If someting in Germany is a rule, there will be someone to enforce it. If a full grown adult tourist tries to cross the street outside the white lines,a little old lady will stumble out and tell you "Ist verboten"-It's forbidden. they are a very rule oriented society.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually many people cross the streets wherever they want and it's very rare that anyone even raises an eyebrow at them, unlike in Los Angeles, where you get fined for jaywalking. I mean, you even have a name for it!

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Zocalo]

Lawyers or law firms are not allowed to sue independently. A client is required.

My understanding of the law from the KIllustrator thing was that there is indeed a client, which in that particular case was Adobe. However, there is a quirk in German trademark law that allows lawyers to initiate a case on behalf of a client without that client being aware of the fact. So, technically there is a "client", and I assume that at some point in the proceedings that they would have to be informed of the fact. Were this be applied to the meta tag instance, then the client would presumably always be the state.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually many people cross the streets wherever they want

What in Germany?! You're kidding aren't you? As a visitor I thought one of the most bizarre things about the place was about how nobody crossed the street against the lights. Even at 3am when there was no traffic at all, people waited patiently for the lights to allow them to cross.

And yes, total strangers will come up and let you know when you break the rules.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

The lawyers in the KIllustrator case were employed by Adobe, IOW representing the Adobe corporation, IOW Adobe itself. They initiated the lawsuit because they were instructed to defend the company against trademark violations. Adobe sued, not some independent lawyers.

The metatag issue is strictly a matter between the defendant on one side and his competitors or certain organizations which work to keep up a good business climate on the other side, but not the state itself. Even if a lawyer could sue independently and choose a client after the fact, that would have to be one of these organizations or a competitor of the defendant, not the state. But that's not how it works. Lawyers' clients, not independant lawyers, sue. No exceptions, no trademark law quirks. The plaintiff in this case was a business association with 1600 members.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this is just a particular experience of you. I live in Germany, cross the streets every day the against lights, and never in my live anybody complained.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[djoiner]

6) Does anyone really use meta-keywords other than spammers

No, and it is unfortunate. I work with a web cataloguing effort in computational science education (The Computational Science Education Reference Desk) and I spend a lot of time trying to define standard metadata for pages on the web.

The job of building digital libraries will be much easier and will better reflect the intention of people who create web content when web content creators put, at a minimum, title, description, and keyword metadata into their pages (and preferably much much more.

The more that meta-spam is used to beat search engines, the less that people will put metadata into their pages, and as a result, the less time that people will spend actually thinking about and creating good metadata.

I have no idea what impact this law will have, if any, but I would like to see more search engines that use metatags, but include some sort of "meta-spam" filter, perhaps a penalty on excessive use of keywords.

Re:How can a court enforce the ruling

[bgackle]

I am aware that meta tags themselves are not illegal. My point is that while meta tag spamming is unfair, a law against it is not needed because search engines already ignore meta tags. Meta tag spammers are thus harmless, because they are ignored.

Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[beh]

I've been dreading this for a loooooong time. The web can hardly improve, if we're starting to get the courts to police what can and can't be put inside HTML tags. I mean, I'm as pissed off as the next guy, when someone abuses meta-tags or any other mechanism in a way just to make them appear higher up in a search engine. But this is NOT the way to deal with it. Forcing people out of using Meta-Tags (and that in ONE country alone), will only make the whole issue of abusing the system move to something new - while the old issue doesn't improve (since it's still perfectly legal to screw up those tags in other countries; or do you think, a search engine would then start handling those tags differently depending on whether they're on a German webpage where they must not be abused, or whether there on a Chinese one, where they can be screwed around with at will?)

While HTML has been around for 10 years or so, I would still consider it a technology that hasn't settled yet. The whole web is still undergoing changes - shortcomings are (partially) being addressed, new things get added.

Getting the courts in at this stage can only stifle further innovation in this sector, because if it continues as it is, in the future we might have to consult legal departments to see whether any changes we might propose will find their acceptance in the ears of judges. :-(

I would hope that the losing side will go into revision and get this whole thing overturned before HTML officially becomes the "HyperText Markup Law".

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[selderrr]

if you outlaw meta tags, only outlaws will have metatags

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is about misrepresenting who you are / what you're doing towards prospective customers of the competition, in the hope that they become your customers. It should not be handled differently than the same/equivalent act in the "offline" world, because it's really just one world. You wouldn't say that people should be allowed to lie on the telephone but not when they're in the same room, would you?

HTML and the web are tools. Abuse needs to be handled in some way or another to keep the tools effective. Since the "internet community" still hasn't come up with a technical solution to bad business practices, we'll have to do what society has found works reasonably well: Punish people for violating the rules and reward people who abide by the rules.

The laws will be enforced because there are people who are (rightfully) interested in stopping the misrepresentations: Competitors will keep an eye on other businesses' webpages and make sure no unlawful tricks are used to lure in customers. German law applies to German companies even if their webserver is in a foreign country, so if you're doing business in the same market as your competitor, you'll have to follow the same rules.

There are lawsuits which could ruin the web, for example attempts to ban deep linking, but this is not one of it.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[gl4ss]

it should be pretty clear that this is not about ruling them illeagal to use.

just that it is wrong/unlawful to lie in them to gain visitors.

a resteurant can't put fake stuff on it's adverts to get customers into the resteurant...

would you be very pleased to buy a newspaper that's first page indexed something that intrests you, but when you open it you only notice that it's full of adverts for xxx lines and nothing else? would you think that such fraud would be legal?

how about starting to read even the blurb.. "Meta-tag keywords may still be used if they are in strong relation to the page"

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[bigpat]

Who is injured? That is the question here, clearly if there was false representation, just like titling a cook book as "Sex here" and an injury proximately and reasonably resulted, then compensation is deserved, but not prior restraint... this is still a fundamental freedom of expression.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[beh]

In effect the ruling gets close to it - because how much of a match will the tag contents have to be?

Also, there is the matter of whom does this apply to?

a) German's websites hosted in Germany?
b) Websites hosted in Germany, whose owner is not
located in Germany?
c) German's Websites hosted abroad?

I happen to be German, and ONE of my two colocation sites is in Germany (the master is in Switzerland, where I lived up until recently), but I do not live in Germany. Am I still bound by this law? (Especially bearing in mind, that only a MIRROR is operating in Germany)?

Trying to build localised jurisdiction on these issues will turn the whole web into a mess.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[gl4ss]

websites targeted at german people most probably. the same kind of cases that would apply when you were advertising for german people(with false promises. like advertising "free repair kits for vw's" when you were just trying to sell them porno magazines..).

besides, it would only apply in the obvious situations where you're for example claiming that you're a windows helping site or something when all that you were trying to do would be to put some pr0n advertising spyware on the visitors computer, it's a no brainer that such activity should indeed be illeagal(luring 'customers' with false promises).

just carry on as usual

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[Anonymous Coward]

The location of the webserver is irrelevant. This applies to you if you're doing business in Germany or are a German business competing for foreign customers with other German businesses, because it is a result of the "Gesetz gegen unlauteren Wettbewerb" (law against unfair competition). This law is an implementation of the European guideline 97/55/EG, so I'd expect other European countries to have similar laws. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[Have Blue]

Thanks to the efforts of search engine optimizers, meta tags are now completely useless. Their intended purpose was to assist search engines, and all the major search engines now ignore them. I see nothing wrong with trying to reclaim this feature.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[einhverfr]

would you be very pleased to buy a newspaper that's first page indexed something that intrests you, but when you open it you only notice that it's full of adverts for xxx lines and nothing else? would you think that such fraud would be legal?

IANAL, but I think that such would be illegal in the US as well. Free speech does not protect commercial speech in the same way it does non-commercial speech. Indeed, it is only the expressive aspects which are protected.

In other words, if someone did this as a joke in the US, it would be legal. But if it was an attempt to get people to look at ads by lying to them, it might not be.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[glesga_kiss]

a resteurant can't put fake stuff on it's adverts to get customers into the resteurant...

That analogy sealed it for me. This kind of thing gets me a lot on the net. You google for some information, say "free motherboard bios", then the top five links don't provide anything without some sort of fee. They lied to get me there. As a rule I never deal with them, even if I have to go without whatever I was looking for.

Of course, meta-tags are a little old hat. I'd like to see the law encompass any method to promote a page. That would stop the google-spammers as well.

I see a lot of people are knocking it because it only works in one country, however there are many times when I use "search UK only" in Google. If the UK had a similar ruling and Google knew this and therefore indexed the tags in UK sites, then searching just got a little better.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[Oligonicella]

"a resteurant can't put fake stuff on it's adverts to get customers into the resteurant..."

Bzzzzt! Does not follow. A web-page does not charge you for entering. Leave if you're miffed. "would you be very pleased to buy a newspaper...adverts for xxx lines and nothing else?

Bzzzzt! Same error.

Cost := nothing.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[FlopEJoe]

"just that it is wrong/unlawful to lie in them to gain visitors."

But... is it still against this law if I'm not selling anything or gaining anthing from eyeballs and clicks? I can't RTFA so do not know. Isn't there free speech in Germany aside from the nazi symbols ban? I can't imagine them going after "Kelly's Pretty Kitty Page" but could they with this?

It seems a difficult thing to enforce... not so much finding offending pages but enumerating what is offending. Is there a percent of erronous tags and who's the liguist that will decide?

I can see this used for two situations. a) As tack on offence where someone's already breaking the law and, "oh, you also have too many tags." b) As a means to look further into your stuff because they just know you're up to no good and need to fish around a bit.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the exact tactics used by the Natnl Enquirer/Star/etc tabloids as well as many teen magazines found at the checkout line. Huge headlines and a tiny story tucked in between all the ads.
It's not illegal, nor do I think it should be, but it certainly gives the paper a bad reputation.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[canajin56]

A resturaunt likewise does not charge you for entering. If they don't offer what they advertised, you are free to stand up and leave. Additionally, in Europe, many ISPs charge by the bit, and for dial up, the telephone company charges by the minute for local calls. So viewing the website DOES cost you something.

Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE!

[Anonymous Coward]

A meta tag is not a statement, nor an "advertisement". It's an HTML tag. It means nothing outside of how it's interpreted in a browser. And as for search engines - I never gave my permission for Google to spider my pages, or to reproduce my copyright content verbatim in its cache, so if my misuse of meta tags upsets Google's users - fuck them. I never gave permission for my pages to be viewed in anything other than a browser that ignores meta tags, and if people wish to use my pages in other ways, it is their choice, and the consequences are 100% their responsibility.

That's what I would argue if I misused meta tags and got taken to court over it.

usage of meta tags?

[Anonymous Coward]

how many search engines actually use meta tags? altavista, google, teoma, yahoo and msn don't support it

Re:usage of meta tags?

[Oddly_Drac]

"how many search engines actually use meta tags? altavista, google, teoma, yahoo and msn don't support it"

Not in isolation, but playing with the rankings suggests that keywords help to 'weight' other words on a given page although a lot more credence has always been given 'relevance' and incoming links.

Re:usage of meta tags?

[billmoss]

To be specific, Google does support some non-keyword meta tags, as in:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow,noarchive">

which of course is very useful.

Re:usage of meta tags?

[X]

Yahoo has said their latest version of their engine does pay attention to meta tags, although for all we know it's ranking them negatively.

In case of slashdotting...

[bje2]

Gericht: Suchmaschinen-Spamming per HTML-Metatags wettbewerbswidrig Das kompendiumartige Auflisten vieler hundert HTML-Metatags ohne jeden inhaltlichen Zusammenhang zu einer Internetseite führe zu einer Manipulation von Suchmaschinen und ist wettbewerbswidrig nach 1 des Gesetzes gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb (UWG). Das entschied das Landgericht Essen in einem jetzt veröffentlichten Urteil vom 26. Mai 2004 (Az. 44 0 166/03). Klägerin des Verfahrens war ein rechtsfähiger Wirtschaftsverband. Nach den Ausführungen des Gerichts führt eine derartige Verwendung von Suchbegriffen dazu, dass die Internetseiten der Beklagten bei der Verwendung von Suchmaschinen an einer der vorderen Stellen benannt und entsprechend von den Nutzern häufiger frequentiert würden. Bei der Verwendung von hunderten lexikonartig aneinander gereihten Begriffen, die auch bei weitem Verständnis keinen Zusammenhang zu den auf den Seiten angebotenen Waren und Dienstleistungen aufweisen, könne es dem Betreiber nicht mehr darum gehen, sein Angebot optimal zu präsentieren. Vielmehr ließe dies nur den Schluss zu, dass dadurch die technischen Schwächen von Suchmaschinen ausgenutzt werden sollten, um sich bei den Suchergebnissen einen Wettbewerbsvorteil zu verschaffen. Dies gelte nach Ansicht der Richter aus Essen allerdings nicht für jede Verwendung von HTML-Metatags. So müsse es ein Mitbewerber hinnehmen, wenn eine Website mit Suchbegriffen gefüllt werde, die im weitesten Sinne noch in einem Zusammenhang zum Leistungsangebot des Betreibers stehen. Gleiches gelte für die Verwendung von Namen, Geschäftsbezeichnungen oder Marken, sofern diese "Bestandteil von auf der Internetseite geschalteten Werbe-Links" seien, um dem Betreiber Geschäfte mit Werbepartner zu ermöglichen. Die Entscheidung des LG Essen erweitert die ohnehin völlig uneinheitliche Rechtsprechung deutscher Gerichte zum Thema HTML-Metatags, bei der es bislang vor allem um die Verwendung fremder Kennzeichen in den Metas ging, um ein weiteres Problemfeld. Eine ähnliche Entscheidung zur Verwendung von sachfremden Begriffen in Metatage hatte im März 2002 das LG Düsseldorf getroffen. Das Urteil war jedoch später vom OLG Düsseldorf aufgehoben worden. Ob gegen die Entscheidung aus Essen Rechtsmittel eingelegt werden, ist noch nicht bekannt. (Joerg Heidrich)/ (tol/c't)

Re:In case of slashdotting...

[electricmba]

Babelfished: Court: Search machine Spamming by HTML Metatags manual-like listing of many hundred HTML Metatags without each contentwise connection to an InterNet side leads competition-adversely to a manipulation of search machines and is competition adverse after 1 of the law against the mean competition (UWG). That decided the regional court meal in a judgement from 26 May 2004 (Az. 44 0 166/03), published now. Plaintiff of the procedure was a legally responsible trade association. After the remarks of the court a such use of search words leads to the fact that the InterNet sides of the deplored ones were designated when using search machines at one of the front places and frequented accordingly by the users more frequently. When using hundreds encyclopedia-like together it cannot concern to gereihten terms, which do not exhibit also by far understanding connection to the goods and services offered on the sides, to the operator any longer to present its offer optimally. Rather this would permit only the conclusion that thereby the technical weaknesses should be used by search machines, in order to provide with the search results a competition advantage. This does not apply in opinion of the judges from meals however to each use of HTML Metatags. So it must accept a competitor, if a Website is filled with search words, in the broadest sense still in a connection for the performance of the operator to stand. Same applies to the use of names, business designations or marks, if these "Bestandteil of advertising Links" switched on the InterNet side; are, in order to make possible for the operator business with advertising partner. The decision of the LG meal extends the anyway completely non-uniform iurisdiction of German courts about HTML Metatags, with which it went so far particularly around the use of strange characteristics into the Metas, by a further problem field. A similar decision for the use of irrelevant terms in Metatage had met the LG Duesseldorf in March 2002. The judgement had been waived however later by the OLG Duesseldorf. Whether against the decision from meals redresses are inserted, is not well-known yet. (Joerg Heidrich)/ (tol/c't)

Re:In case of slashdotting...

[isorox]

When you Babelfish something, you're meant to do it into English

Re:In case of slashdotting...

[Anne_Nonymous]

Gesundheit!

Re:In case of slashdotting...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Babelfish:
LG* Essen is translated in LG meal.

*county/district/regional/provincial court (I don't know what it's exactly corresponding to.)

Meta tags can be very effective

[caitsith01]

As a small scale web developer I can attest to the fact that meta-tag 'spamming' can be very effective. Google may not respond, but other engines do. As soon as that happens, up goes your Google ranking.

Of course, I don't really consider it spamming to include variations, common misspellings, etc. etc., and any search engine worth its salt will ignore repeated words in a single meta tag.

As for Google - who knows how they do their rankings nowadays...

Re:Meta tags can be very effective

[wikdwarlock]

The point that once other engines like your site, Google starts to take notice is a good one. You don't need the credentials as the authority on the subject, so long as you can get some street cred w/ other, less discerning engines first.

Re:Meta tags can be very effective

[slappyjack]

As for Google - who knows how they do their rankings nowadays...

I'm pretty sure it has something to to with chicken bones, pig blood, and the Illumanti.

We'll find out soon enough, as M. Night Shaymalan is addressing the topic in his next movie The Page. I saw a preview of it the other night. The tagline?

"I read background colored text..."

Re:Meta tags can be very effective

[danila]

Apparently they now rely on one thing alone - URL spamm^H^H^H^H^Hindexing - things like like www.small-scale-web-developer.com/small_scale_web_ developer/small_scale_web_developer.html

Seriously, I don't understand how retarded those hundreds of PhDs must be to not fix such a blatant abuse in nearly a year. More than half Google queries now bring a few spam results on the first/second pages, most of which use the URL spamming.

What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

First: Anchor tag illegal (requires license to link)
Second: Meta tag illegal
Next: HTML tag declared unconstutional

Re:What's next?

[Snork Asaurus]

First: Anchor tag illegal (requires license to link)
Second: Meta tag illegal
Next: HTML tag declared unconstutional

How about a ruling against Flash? Now there's something I could get behind.

Re:What's next?

[Otter]

First: Anchor tag illegal (requires license to link)

FYI, that "license required to link" story was yet another example of an illiterate submitter and a lazy editor generating a fraudulent controversy. (And, in this case, also blaming it on the wrong company.)

Re:What's next?

[McWilde]

But what about Home Star?

Re:What's next?

[genericacct]

You might try Flashblock for Mozilla/Netscape7/Firefox. I love it.

Re:What's next?

[gl4ss]

it's not meta-tags that are under scrutiny..

it's FALSE CONTENT in those meta tags that's the target.

Re:What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thinking death penalty for

<font color="yellow">

Re:What's next?

[cjpez]

How about a ruling against Flash?

I used to think the exact same thing until Little Fluffy Industries ruined my productivity.

Re:What's next?

[FlopEJoe]

...

Then they came for me.

And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

-- Dietrich Bonnhoefer

Re:What's next?

[roman_mir]

Sure, but I actually like this site.

Translation

[iammrjvo]

I can hardly understand German anymore, but it's still easier to understand the German site than that computer generated "translation."

Can anybody take a crack at a decent translation?

Re:Translation

[Short Circuit]

Well, you can try the Babelfish translation, but IMO it's not as good as the Googlefish one supplied.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Court: According to fair-trade law, seach engine spamming via HTML metatags has been deemed anti-competitive, if such tags have no coherent context in common with the site containing them.

The district court opinion comes from a now-public decision on May 26th of this year. The plaintiff in the case held the legal status of a trade union. Pursuant to the rights accorded by this legal status, the plaintiff complained that the defendant excessively used [incoherent] search terms for the same [anticompetitive] purposes.

Due to the combined usage of an encyclopedic list of hundreds of words, which together have no perceptible relation to the products and services offered on the site, it is possible that the [search engine] user is not presented with an optimal choice [in the search results]. [This leads to a general market tendency] to exploit the weaknesses of search engines in order to provide a competitive edge.

This court decision does not apply to all uses of META tags - a company must conceded if a competitor's website is stuffed with search terms if, in a general sense, the terms stay in line with the service offerings of the site.

The same [exception] applies for the use of names, business terms or brands, in instances where these "external cross-promotional links" [exist] in promotional support of a partner of the hosting company.

The decision of the district court expands the otherwise completely non-uniform German case law on the subject of HTML META tags, which has so far completely relegated anomalous uses of META tags to another class of problem. (??)

A similar decision was struck by the Duesseldorf district court in March 2002 on anomalous uses of META tags. However, that decision was later overturned by Duesseldorf's upper district court. Unless [the latest] decision survives appeals court, it is still not firmly established. (Joerg Heidrich)/ (tol/c't)

Like banning 5.25" disk notchers

[danamania]

Since really relevant results aren't generally gained from reading meta tags, and search engines & indexers that analyse pages don't use them so much any more, it seems to be a bit like banning disk notchers for getting double the capacity out of single sided 5.25" disks. Sure you might gain some sales of 5.25" disks but... who really cares?

Re:Like banning 5.25" disk notchers

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you might gain some sales of 5.25" disks but... who really cares?

You've just got an entire generation of Commodore 64 and Apple ][ lovers baying for your blood

Man

[foidulus]

will they sue The Onion for managing to be the first result for a google search for the?

Re:Man

[Mark Hood]

What gets me, is this: Google claims to be searching 4,285,199,774 web pages... And yet that search for the gives no less than "about 5,900,000,000" results.

Methinks Google has a looping web page or two indexed...

Re:Man

[Prowl]

would it be wrong to assume that, seeing as the word "The" is virtually omnipresent, that is actually a list of the highest ranking sites in google?

Re:Man

[Anonymous Coward]

chortle -- check out the Onion's keywords:
"Ted Nugent" !? Jesus Christ!

The Onion, Onion, America's Finest News Source, satire, political, humor, comedy, jokes, editorial, magazine, newspaper, In the News, News in Brief, Top Story, What Do You Think, Infographic, STATShot, The Onion in History, area man, area woman, wit, pop culture, shattered nation, Attack, Middle East crisis, Iraq, Americans, George W Bush, Congress, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Ralph Nader, religion, God, Christ, Pope, Starbucks, Star Wars, Death Star, special forces, Crypty, Cryptosporidium, Eminem, Ted Nugent, Harry Potter, monkey, school, college, drugs, marijuana, ferret, campus life, Taco Bell, Doritos, NASA, NASCAR, Microsoft, Bill Gates, Books, Our Dumb Century, Dispatches from the Tenth Circle, Onion calendars, Onion print edition, Onion mobile edition, merchandise, Smoove B, love man, Jim Anchower, The Cruise, Jean Teasdale, A Room of Jean's Own, Jeanketeer, Jackie Harvey, The Outside Scoop, Herbert Kornfeld, h-dog, point-counterpoint, T. Herman Zweibel, The Mercantile Onion, Advice, Reviews, Justify Your Existence, Savage Love, Red Meat, Pathetic Geek Stories"

Re:Man

[foidulus]

Though oddly enough, in a search for Smoove B a site that links to the onion itself is at the bottom of the first page....

Re:Man

[caluml]

Only narrowly beating The Whitehouse. :)

While we are at it

[levik]

Can somebody ban the BLINK tag please? And pages full of CENTERed text?

Re:While we are at it

[tiger99]

And fixed font sizes, bad colour combinations etc, all of which cause eyestrain to those of us who run our monitors at higher than 800*600.

Of course, we can always use Mozilla, Firefox, or another decent browser at home, which will allow the text to be made legible, but at work many of us have to use Incompetent Exploder, which says a lot about our IT staff.

Re:While we are at it

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can somebody ban the BLINK tag please?"

<blink>Mozilla can!</blink>

Just put this in userstyles.css:

blink { text-decoration: none ! important }

The bottom line

[Launch]

This is just kinda pointless... No one to go out and actatively enforce, and meta-tags aren't used by search engines anyway... I guess if a court was trying to throw the book at a company who's website was in violation of other laws that this might be something they could stack on, but other than that it seems like it's not that big of a deal.

Vague

[Richard Dick Head]

As my German Physics teacher said constantly, and apparently the German court is saying as well - "let's be vague." >:)

While we're at it, I think it should be illegal to cook your eggs on your tinfoil hat.

Re:Vague

[Mr Guy]

If your hat cooks your eggs you aren't wearing it right.

Thank you, I'll be here all week, try the veal.

Freedom of speech?

[fearlezz]

However I absolutely hate spam in every way, I think this ruling is rediculous. It's even restricting freedom of speech. Can the german government tell you how to answer to a http request?

Also: With regular email spam, the unwanted message is PUSHED to the victim, eating the victims bandwidth. Here, the victim (search engine spider) is pulling data from the server. If they don't want spam, don't use the meta tags.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Anita Coney]

The last time I checked Germany never signed the Bill of Rights.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[ahillen]

It's even restricting freedom of speech.

I think the court ruling has nothing to do with spam. The court ruling is based on the German 'law against dishonest competition' ('Gesetz gegen unlauteren Wettbewerb'). So basically it means that the court decided that if a company is trying to lure people to their website by extensively using meta tags which have absolutely nothing to do with their business, they are in violation of this law. IANAL, but I think among other things this law says that a company is not allowed to make false statements in advertisement etc. So saying (eg in an advertisement) that a product has some special property while it hasn't is not protected by free speech. Is it in the US?

Re:Freedom of Speech?

[radja]

to me, it sounds more like deceptive advertising.

Re:Freedom of Speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of any country where you have a "basic right to put whatever you want on your own web page." You might be able to get away with things in certain lax countries but for the most part there are definite legal limits. I would also point out that Germany does not have to follow the same laws as the US and its Bill of Rights.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? That does not mean Germany lacks a freedom of speech. ahillen's more insightful comment after yours actually explains how this fits into German law. And how it could actually fit into USian law, as well.

Even in the United States of America, regulation of commercial speech is allowed.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[RWerp]

The last time I checked, the USA never ratified the Convention on Rights of Child. Or the Landmine ban.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[imsabbel]

Is it freedom of speech if you set up a supermarket front (complete with walmart sign, shopping cars,ect), so that people only notice you are running a brothel when they are inside?

The same with metatag spamming: Its lying in order to make profit, someting most contries have a law against.

Re:Freedom of Speech?

[pjt33]

You don't have that "basic right" anyway. There are all sorts of laws restricting what you can put on your own web page - consider copyright legislation, legislation to prevent incitement to commit various crimes, in Germany probably anti-neo-Nazi legislation, etc.

Re:Freedom of Speech?

[JSkills]

I know I know - but it's not a decent analogy to compare neo-Nazi stuff to deceptive metatagging is it?

I guess the problem I see with it is that it would appear to be way too subjective in many cases. It would be one thing if people with a porn site used META keywords like "free children's games", but what about some of the more gray areas?

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

The last tiem I checked USA still invades foreign countries. Throw-stone-back

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no. It is a court ruling via "competition law".

Freedom of speech applies to individuals, not to businesses and commercial advertisements.

Competition law is of great importance to combar IP extremism such as software patents and other ani-competitive restrictions of interoperability.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Asic Eng]

No, but just like the US and many other nations, Germany signed the UN declaration of human rights. (article 19) Germany is therefore legally bound to guarantee free speech to it's citizens. Additionally the German constitution contains free speech and free press rights.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Pius II.]

This is about fraudulent advertising.
The law invoked was the "Wettbewerbsrecht", meaning this is about an issue between two commercial entities. On a private (i.e. non-profit) homepage these laws wouldn't apply.

The only thing that is forbidden after this decision is to put irrelevant keywords into the meta tag. (such as "SEX SEX SEX BRITNEY SPEARS NAKED" into a the meta tag of a cell phone fraud site such as these).

There have already been several decisions on the topic wether it is allowed to use your competitors trademarks in meta tags (like MS putting "WordPerfect" in the Office site meta tags); there's a new one every six months :-).

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Asic Eng]

The German constitution grants free speech rights to it's citizens - however it grants those solely to natural persons, i.e. not to companies. Consequently people can fill their own websites with as many nonsensical meta tags as they want - however company websites face the constraints described in the article. (The court ruling restricted itself specifically to commercial sites.)

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Just Some Guy]

So saying (eg in an advertisement) that a product has some special property while it hasn't is not protected by free speech. Is it in the US?

Apparently so, as evidenced by the fact that every other advertisement on television is for a "natural" product to help you sleep, make your breath fresh, or give you an erection. Of course, they all carry a standard "These claims have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration..." disclaimer in a 2-point font, so maybe that's what makes it acceptable.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Ozan]

However I absolutely hate spam in every way, I think this ruling is rediculous. It's even restricting freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to lie without consequences.

Can the german government tell you how to answer to a http request?

Yet again someone who can't distinguish between government and courts.

Also: With regular email spam, the unwanted message is PUSHED to the victim, eating the victims bandwidth. Here, the victim (search engine spider) is pulling data from the server. If they don't want spam, don't use the meta tags.

The 'victim' is not the search engine but the internet surfer looking for something on a webpage that isn't there, wasting his time and bandwith, and the competitor to the webpages owner. And that's why they sued.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice how those ads eventually disappear? The FTC eventually steps in and stops the companies doing the dishonest advertising. The FDA disclaimer is just to keep the FDA off their backs. U.S. bureacracy makes the take-down far too slow, however.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...However I absolutely hate spam in every way, I think this ruling is rediculous."

Not to be overly nit-picky, but the word is 'ridiculous,' meaning, 'that which is worthy of ridicule,' not 're-diculous,' which would be the repetition of something that is 'diculous'

Just a pet peeve of mine...

Re:Freedom of speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I checked Germany never signed the Bill of Rights.

What??? Didn't we already acquire them? No? Then what in the hell was that damn war about, anyway? I thought we wanted some low cost German products!

Why and how?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why was this brought up into the courts anyways?

This is absolutely retarded. The solution against "keyword spammers" is better search engines obviously. If your search engine is going to be so simple and flawed so as to rely strictly on prevalence of a keyword (rather than say, also ranking by link popularity as does Google) then your search engine deserves to be exploited by the "spammers". I don't see why the courts need to get involved at all in such matters.

Perhaps it was the use of the word "spammers" that made the non-techs in the legal system think this had to do with EMAIL spam...???

Retarded Retarded Retarded Retarded Retarded Retarded Retarded Retarded Retarded... OOPS! Watch out Slashdot. The german HTML police will come after you now!

Re:Why and how?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was ruled that Metatag constitutes advertising so putting words which have nothing to do with the site is false advertising.

Sound more reasonable now?

Why not solve technically, rather than legally?

[nebaz]

Here's an idea. Why not rewrite the search engines to ignore all sites that have too many words in their meta tags? Seems like it would take care of the "dictionary dumpers".

Why does this belongs in Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google barely has anything to do with the article!

Freedom of Speech?

[JSkills]

This is not to say that I am in any way even slightly acquainted with German law, but doesn't this issue sound like it violates one's basic right to put whatever you want on your own web page?

Not that I would ever advocate people using deceptive META tagging, but as someone previously stated, wouldn't this close to impossible to police?

Uhh...

[NoMercy]

So here's an antiquated feature which no-one ever uses, now it's illegal to use it.

The mind boggles when you concider that a search engine could have used in-accurate headers to lower a pages ranking.

Re:While we are at it - already done

[Anonymous Coward]

I think BLINK and CENTER are depracated in XHTML, thanks to the W3C. ;-)

Bless Goethe's mother tongue

[mantera]

"When using hundreds encyclopedia-like together it cannot concern to gereihten terms,..."

I don't know why, though i've never heard the word before, gereihten sounds a 100 times more expressive than any English word.

Re:Bless Goethe's mother tongue

[blackula]

Never post again.

just goes to show...

[erroneus]

...the difference in speed of law and the speed of technology. They should attempt, if they really feel the need, to generalize the law a bit more to cover all superfluous data that is intended to artificially boost search ranking. Of course that might be dangerous too... I guess law-making ain't as easy as we generally imagine it to be... gotta be fair to the people (constituents) and especially to your customers (the ones who buy legistlation)!

Re:just goes to show...

[Jadrano]

They should attempt, if they really feel the need, to generalize the law a bit more to cover all superfluous data that is intended to artificially boost search ranking.

It's not a special law about meta-tags, they have just applied general laws about advertizing. So, there is no reason why this couldn't be applied to other deceptive technique to boost the ranking of a commercial website.

Right place for this judgement.

[lysium]

It has been my observation that German sites are the worst offenders of meta tag spam. Many a Google search is ruined by pages upon pages of their scripty garbage. I often resort to blocking .de from search results, just to maintain some sanity.

Re:Right place for this judgement.

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been my observation that German sites are the worst offenders of meta tag spam. Many a Google search is ruined by pages upon pages of their scripty garbage. I often resort to blocking .de from search results, just to maintain some sanity.

1) Really? Like what? Could you give any examples?

2) Waitaminute. Google? I thought we all agreed Google doesn't use meta-tags. Or does it only use them on German pages?

3) How do you do that? I'm not that fluent in Google, I must confess. Is it "... AND NOT site:.de"?

Stupid stupid stupid.

[reynhout]

It doesn't even matter whether meta tag spamming works, or whether the laws are enforceable. The idea that a government would try to regulate it is insane.

Since when are Internet users under an obligation to be relevant or consistent in anything they write? Sure, we can't infringe copyrights and we can't be libellous, but those are general laws that happen to apply to the Internet as well.

And when were search engines granted protections for their technical operational model, anyway? What's next? All pages must be valid HTML4.01 STRICT so that crawler parsers can run faster? Stupid stupid stupid.

As disappointed as I sometimes get about the USA being out of control in the world, "enlightened" governments like Germany or France or Canada seem to go out of their way to prove that if they had the global resources, they'd be just as bad or worse as the lone superpower.

Re:Stupid stupid stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no law in Germany which specifically forbids HTML meta tags. This ruling is due to an "offline" law which happens to apply to the online world too. Just like you must not infringe on copyrights online because the law doesn't exclude the internet, you are not allowed to pretend you're your competitor in order to fool customers, neither offline nor online.

Re:Stupid stupid stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Since when are Internet users under an obligation to be relevant or consistent in anything they write? Sure, we can't infringe copyrights and we can't be libellous, but those are general laws that happen to apply to the Internet as well.

False advertising is a _general_ law that also happens to apply to the internet in this situation as well.

Re:Stupid stupid stupid.

[Apathetic1]

"What's next, x?" is a bogus argument but I'll bite. So, as devil's advocate, why would it be stupid for pages being required to conform to the standards? It would certainly require browser work and a lot of pages would have to be updated but there would be a net benefit for web developers. Write once, read anywhere. In terms of accessibility for the disabled, requiring sites to be standards compliant would be a huge leap forward. Website bandwidth usage would go down, especially with cached CSS for styles.

The article's about Germany so I can understand why you mentioned them specifically (and I happen to agree that this law is fairly useless and counter-productive) but what provoked the random France and Canada bashing?

Re:Stupid stupid stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reyhout, it is about business activities not about you and me. This time I agree with the courts. rulings via the competition law track are usually very helpful. From an ordoliberal perspective I think there is nothing wrong with it.

Re:Stupid stupid stupid.

[Bingo Foo]

"What's next, x?" is a bogus argument

No it's not. It may not be a logically necessary argument, but in practice it is completely reasonable to ask. Attempts at using logical rigor to set your expectations in arenas of social policy, even when it defies all experience and common sense strikes me as being significantly more bogus.

Re:Stupid stupid stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

if only there was a Score: 6, give this post a spinoff article.

Re:Stupid stupid stupid.

[Apathetic1]

A rhetorical "what's next" question such as the one in the root post is rarely a reasonable one. The point of asking the question is to illustrate how ridiculous one believes the concept to be. It rarely adds anything valuable to the discussion.

Eating meat? What's next, eating children? That's a very poor argument against eating meat.

We only need to be wary of a slippery slope if the next step follows reasonably from the previous.

Re:Stupid stupid stupid.

[polyp2000]

And when were search engines granted protections for their technical operational model, anyway? What's next? All pages must be valid HTML4.01 STRICT so that crawler parsers can run faster? Stupid stupid stupid.

Yes it would be stupid to do that, but deep inside im thinking that would be an excellent way to get web developers to produce compliant websites. It might even force Microsoft to make IE compliant.

But then ... chance is a fine thing ;)

More unenforceable legislation...

[stromthurman]

\begin{kneejerk} As a few have already pointed out, such a system cannot be effectively enforced. Why do we need more pointless legislation like this? \end{kneejerk} All that aside, this is always going to be a problem when data that describes the

document

is written by the original document author. Meta data, ultimately, is only useful to the person who one who authors it. No one should be regulating such data, because it shouldn't really be trusted in the first place. Search engines should, and many do, weigh the websites based upon their actual content. Not the description of the content described by the author of the content. In peer-review systems, keywords and abstracts can be verified, thus promoting their correctness, such is obviously not the case on the web.

Re:More unenforceable legislation...

[ab762]

It's not legislation. It's a court ruling in an anti-trust suit. RTFA, please.

Re:More unenforceable legislation...

[Jadrano]

As a few have already pointed out, such a system cannot be effectively enforced. Why do we need more pointless legislation like this?

• it's not legislation, but the application of existing laws
• Who cares if it's not always enforced? If deceptive meta-tags, which hardly anyone uses in searches, are used, it's not a problem. But if competitors who legitimately use keywords get lower ranks because of others that use the same keywords although they don't have anything to do with their offering, they will care and try to enforce it (with other kinds of deceptive advertising it's the same, no one will screen all advertisements, but in some cases a competitor takes action).

No it is for throwing the book against someone

[SmallFurryCreature]

It is pretty simple. Say some site is a problem the german court wants to tackle. Perhaps it is luring kids into giving their email address in order to then spam them. Now what are the cops going to do. Well search through the law books for any tiny little thing done wrong and then stack it all up and present it to a judge. He will then have a whole lot of things he can find guilty or not guilty on and slap a sentence.

Law sadly works this way, Al Capone was gotten on tax evasion, Ted Bundy was arrested for ignoring a stop sign (or something like that) etc etc.

With the web becoming more and more important we need to give the law at least some tools to use against fraudsters. It is like slapping those fly-by-night stores that sell crap with fire-safety violations. Just any way to get them.

I would be extremely suprised if any normal site would ever be prosecuted. These kinds of laws ain't for enforcing, they are for slapping people with while you try to proof the thougher crime. Fraud is hard to proof, 1000 keywords is not. Fraud will get the site down and the fraudster in jail. 1000 keywords will get the site down while waiting for the fraud trial.

German judges need a life.

[oliverthered]

Ahh.. the poor germans must be having problems searching for there home page and not being top of the list....

I don't expect google to drop the golden egg in my lap, and I do expect more than just turkey recipies when I search for the word breast, a little bit of spam never hurt me enough to even consider banning extream metta-tagging, it did teach me to use junk email addresses for public info and real ones for private email.

Re:German judges need a life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh.. the poor germans must be having problems searching for there home page and not being top of the list....

There, their, they're...

Re:German judges need a life.

[Bingo Foo]

We should see about finding some enlightened European country willing to outlaw the misuse of words. Ah, yes, what a paradise our continental betters have.

Why funny?!

[stefankoegl]

That's the original text from the Heise site. Shouldn't this be moderated as 'informative'? Stefan

Re:Why funny?!

[electricmba]

Heh, maybe because some of the translation is 'funny': "This does not apply in opinion of the judges from meals however to each use of HTML Metatags" :)

Re:Why funny?!

[ortcutt]

The translation is funny in parts, especially "regular court meal" for "Landgericht Essen". Essen is a city in Germany but the word can also mean "meal".

The original, of course, should be marked informative. What, is text in a language other than English automatically funny? Very parochial.

Re:Why funny?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What, is text in a language other than English automatically funny?
No. But the title "In case of slashdotting" is - heise.de is huge - and slashdots (geheist) pages itself sometimes ....

Re:Why funny?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Warrum nicht 'informativ'?

meta tags are ignored. Just another casualty

[SmallFurryCreature]

Most big search engines ignore meta-tags. Just another casualty of spammers and assholes in general. Just as you can no longer just post your email address using meta-tags to describe your site has become impossible. Now you need to hope that the search engine is smart enough to deduct the subject from the text.

Current dictonary dumpters put their spam in the normal text and try to make simple sentences out of it.

I am personally getting tired of it. Perhaps it is time for a .checked domain where only respectable companies are allowed that have in their contract certain behavior codes like DO NOT FRICKING MAKE SEARCH ENGINES IMPOSSIBLE TO USE.

It wouldn't have to be censorship as porn could easily exist in such a domain. Just as long as it just uses porn keywords and only those keywords that actually relate to the content sold.

Oh well, a trusted web where everyone just behaves. I can dream can't I?

Re:While we are at it - already done

[XemonerdX]

Yeah, but the W3C only gives out recommendations, they don't enforce 'em.

Google could eradicate metaspam easily by...

[Kieckerjan]

(1) publishing what exactly they consider to be a single metatag keyword (e.g. a string of alphanumeric characters)
(2) publishing that they will only process the first, say, ten metatag keywords in a document.
(3) acting accordingly

A healthy competition would evolve. Other engines would follow suit. Problem solved. No lawyers needed.

Re:Google could eradicate metaspam easily by...

[Anonymous Coward]

A porn site with the meta keywords "toaster, pokemon, star trek, shoe, mercedes" would still be spamming unless it offered pictures of roasted aliens with a foot fetish copulating with unfunny androids in the back seat of a luxury car.

Re:Google could eradicate metaspam easily by...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google completely ignore meta keywords. The only thing that including them does in terms of Google is drive your actual content, which Google does pay attention to, further down the page, which makes it less likely that Google will index you for your desired keywords.

Not about Freedom of Speech

[ebcdic]

This was a ruling about unfair competition, not about personal web pages. Almost all countries restrict what can be said in advertising, so I don't see anything special about this.

What next?

[AnkitS]

After having conquered the battle against spam, Germany has deceided to declare a war on Slashdot trolls...

Question about public non-Internet networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Are public non-internet networks regulated by this? What if a company or organization got fed up with the way "The Internet" was being regulated and wanted to create a new/entirely separate network to bring back the "good ol' days" of the net..?

This is how stupid laws are made.

[Hulver]

I was reading a book about stupid laws the other day. The sheer quantity of absolutly inane and crazy stuff that gets passed is mind boggling.

There is one state in the US (I can't remember which) where if your car unsettles a horse, you have to pull over to the side of the road and stop you engine. If the horse is still alarmed by your car, you have to dismantle it and hide it in the bushes.

This is exactly the same class of law. Stupid, stupid, and stupid. It's already out of date, because so few search engines use Meta tags to index content anymore.

Re:slashdot, hot teens, Athlon, Radeon, xxx, lolit

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the CO$ bit. ;)

Obviously, this makes no sense

[CompSci101]

I used to think that only we in the good ol' USA could come up with ridiculous judgments like this (the never-ending innovation in legal interpretation). Nice to see insanity is a generally human condition. Hopefully, this won't pass muster in the US under Freedom Of Speech, but I'm not hopeful (has our Justice Department / Judiciary given anyone hope recently? Just curious...)

It seems redundant to post on Slashdot that this is senseless legislation. I'm sure everyone here would clearly agree that legislating on the merits/legality of <meta> tags is absurd.

What really bothers me about this is that this is a judgment specifically to address a shortcoming in a commercial product! What, just because everybody loves Google and uses it every day some court is going to decide that it's illegal to put particular kinds of content on your website because -- uh, oh! -- Google doesn't know how to fairly rank sites containing this content?

Clearly, all one needs to do is become popular enough -- the courts will eventually find a way to bend the system to suit you. And, yes, I'm leveling this at e-mail, too, although at least in that case you're being harassed externally by a business you don't want to have contact with. Here, a robot is (uninvitedly) scouring your webpages to figure out where things are on the web, and isn't smart enough to figure out that you have a lot of crap on your website. The system is clearly broken, and yet instead of trying to fix the blatant technical problems we're trying to legislate them away.

What next? Make it illegal to have invisible blocks of text that just have the same word over and over to get a better ranking with full-text search?

Why not build a better search engine?

C

Finally

[chillmost]

Now when I search for "Hot German Honeys" I might get some relevant results.

Seriously though, in a perfect world it might be a cool thing, but this is the Internet, a nebulous constantly changing thingamabob. I'm afraid the German government might waste all kinds of money and resources trying to actually enforce this. It will probably be just as big a farce as the "Dosenpfand" (deposits on cans) program from last year.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Now when I search for "Hot German Honeys" I might get some relevant results.

Few people know that Germany produces some of the finest spiced honey in the world.

Re:Finally

[chillmost]

Now when I search for "Hot German Honeys" I might get some relevant results.

Few people know that Germany produces some of the finest spiced honey in the world.

Ohhhh. That explains a few things then..

Re:Finally

[Jadrano]

I'm afraid the German government might waste all kinds of money and resources trying to actually enforce this.

Nonsense, deceptive advertisement is not a criminal offense. The ruling described in the article was in a lawsuit in a civil court. Unless a competitor (or perhaps a consumer organization if that's possible in this case) sues, nothing is done.

Thank God!

[Pan T. Hose]

It will disappear now, just like Marijuana.

Re:Thank God!

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. first tried to out-law mary jane back in 1937. That tax act eventually was overthrown by a 1969 Supreme Court decision as being unconsitutional. One year later the 1970 Omnibus Drug Control act laid the ground work for the 34 year war against people taking unapproved substances into their body. Nixon's administration ramped it up and no one has done anything sane about it since.

they will spend it

[Squiddl3]

>I'm afraid the German government might waste all
>kinds of money and resources trying to actually
>enforce this.

Believe me, they will. Living in this country is quite a pitty if you look what's done with your money. But i think thats everywhere the same.

Allthough in Germany there is no such thing of finding law through court like in USofA. Here the laws are more important than there. I don't know if it's better, but it relatives this courts decission.

Nevertheless. The really bad thin about it is, that such decissions take us one step further to throw the USofA from the throne "Most stupid laws". :) I don't know what I should think about it, if I have to think about it in which state I am to decide should I smoke on the street or not can I drink or not. :)

no pun intended

kinda makes sense

[anno1602]

Hopefully, this won't pass muster in the US under Freedom Of Speech

What do meta-tags have to do with freedom of speech? They're supposed to describe the content of the website. Two words: "false advertising". Even in the US, you can't put "100% orange juice" on a can of coke.

I'm sure everyone here would clearly agree that legislating on the merits/legality of tags is absurd

In principle, I welcome the judgement. It may be hard to enforce, but, to quote Dubya, "make no mistake": Police enforcement will not be needed, the voluntary consumer protection organistions and lawyers will take care of that - so, German webmasters, unless you want a letter from some weird law firm you've never previously heard of, check those meta tags! That the judgement is unenforcable outdside of Germany is of course true, but that doesn't prevent the Germans from keeping their part of the web neat and tidy, does it?

What really bothers me about this is that this is a judgment specifically to address a shortcoming in a commercial product! What, just because everybody loves Google and uses it every day some court is going to decide that it's illegal to put particular kinds of content on your website because -- uh, oh! -- Google doesn't know how to fairly rank sites containing this content?

You, sir, are a troll, and I have bitten. Google ignores the meta tags, so this judgement has nothing to do with Google.

Make it illegal to have invisible blocks of text that just have the same word over and over to get a better ranking with full-text search?

Well, if these invisible blocks of texts infringe on your competitor's rights (as was the case with these meta tags), yes, they would be illegal, invisble or not. Remember: Your own freedom only reaches as far as it doesn't reduce the freedom of others

my translation attempt

[iwbcman]

Court: Spamming via HTML-Metatags is anti-competitive.
The all encompossing listing of several hundred of HTML-Metatags which have no relation to the content of the web page leads to the manipulation of Web Search Engines and is therefore anti-competitive as defined in 1 of the Fair Trade Law.
The district court of Essen, whose proceedings have now been published, arrived at this decision in a public trial on 24th of May 2004(Case Nr. 44 0 166/03.) The plaintiff in this case was a legally entitled buisness organization. According to the findings of the court such a use of search keywords lead to search engines placing webpages of the accused in the first positions and correspondingly causing these sites to be more frequented by users. The operaters by using hundreds of keywords, as found in a lexicon, grouped together, which even taken broadly, are without discernable relationship to the services and products being offered on the webpages and therefore could not be being used for the optimal presentation of their offerings. Rather the only conclusion to be drawn is that the use of such techniques only served to take advantage of technical weaknesses of the search engines in order to give the operators competitive advantage.
This, according the Essen Jugde, does not apply to all uses of HTML-metatags. Acccordingly a competitor must accept when a webpage(internet site) is full of such keywords when these are related to the service offerings of the operator. The same applies to the use of names, company names and logos, in as far as these are "constitutive of the internet sites' embedded advertising links", in order to enable the operator to do buisness with advertising partners.
The decision of the district court of Essen expands the otherwise totally non-uniform juristic findings of german courts conerning HTML-Metatags, which up to now have been concerned with the use of others' propietary('fremder') keywords in the Metatags, which is a different field of problems. A similiar decision was reached by the district court of Düsseldorf in March 2002 concerning the use of unrelated keywords in Metatags. This decision was however later revised by the superiror district cour of Düsseldorf. Whether or not the decision of Essen is to be appealed has not yet known.

Passing laws isn't free

[GoClick]

Passing laws isn't free it takes a lot of highly paid people's time, I'd like to know who introduced such a backwards waste of time. If I were a German I'd be super pissed.

I'm Penis Outraged by Keyword Spamming Breast!

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of lesbian low, underhanded porn tactic bondage should be tits banned from the vagina internet! It ruins cock perfectly good search sex engine snatch results with hot wet irrelevent hits! This sort of cock ring sleazy practice should barely legal result in boobies serious economic repercussions rimjob by the msterbation miscreants responsible for it blowjob! Hopefully, the big pussy search engines fornication like Google oral, MSN anal, and Yahoo nipple clamps are screening out this hot, sweaty, naked, thrusting brand of spam.

Crow T. Trollbot

the competitors will

[Karoshi]

The court won't enforce it.

But the competitors will, just like they sue their competitors for missing information in the imprint, use of trademarks, links to "wrong" sites or any other information on a site that isn't acceptable to german courts.

declare popups illegal

[felixcatz]

Would be more useful if the court could declare illegal pop-up browser windows and irritating "flash" that so many websites now consider essential.

This is what laws are supposed to do

[0x0d0a]

The problem is that the court is doing the traditional role of law. If there is a social problem as a result of abusive behavior, a law is produced to prohibit that behavior. The problem is that (a) behavior limitations on the Internet are largely unenforceable and (b) that in many cases, we can just redesign a system. If someone abuses the telephone lines, we're fucked, because it costs too much to deploy a new abuse-resistant system. If someone abuses a piece of software (keyword-using search engines), it's cheap and easy to just produce a new search engine that ignores keywords, like Google.

The problem is that a lot of judges haven't caught on to this (Why would they? There's nobody actively informing them of the fact!), and are still doing their duty as they would in a traditional environment, even though it serves no purpose and stifles new systems on the Internet.

Not only meta-tags

[Anonymous Coward]

In the case in question the defendant used meta-tags to place all kinds of words on his website that had no relation to his business. So on first glance the ruling is about meta-tags only. But in fact, the plaintiff requested a restaining order, and what he got is this:

Dem Beklagten wird [...] untersagt, im geschäftlichen Verkehr zu Wettbewerbszwecken auf kommerziellen Webseiten [...] fremde Namen, Geschäftsbezeichnungen, Marken oder sonstige Begriffe zu verwenden, wenn die Webseiten keinen inhaltlichen Bezug zu den verwendeten Namen, Geschäftsbezeichnungen, Marken oder Begriffen aufweisen, auch wenn die Verwendung dergestalt erfolgt, dass die Begriffe für den Internet-Nutzer nicht bei Aufrufen der Domain unmittelbar sichtbar sind, sondern nur von Suchmaschinen ausgewertet werden oder im Quelltext ersichtlich sind.

In English:

The defendant is enjoined from using, for commercial purposes on his website, names and trademarks that do not belong to him, or other words, if these names, trademarks, or words have no relation to the websites they're on, even when they are used in such a way that they are invisible to a casual visitor and are only interpreted by search engines or visible in the source code.

So this means that you may not place an entire dictionary in black-on-black on your website, where only Google will see it, but you may use words that somehow relate to your business, even if the sole purpose is to advance your Google rank. (Or at least this ruling doesn't prevent you from doing that.)

It should be noted that the caption "declared illegal in Germany" is a little bit misleading. No court is bound by this ruling. What's more, as Heise rightly notes, the German courts have yet to find a clear position on what you can and cannot do in meta-tags. For example, in February the OLG Düsseldorf ruled that it is o.k. to use someone else's trademark in your meta-tags to attract visitors. But other courts have ruled the same thing illegal (e.g. LG München I very recently). http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/49232 has some details.

Mod me down

[CableModemSniper]

In Soviet East Germany, Meta-Tags outlaw you!

This is no law.

[fforw]

A trade association sued a single company for using deceptive meta-tags and that being anticompetitive practice.

The court (Landgericht Essen) decided that it is indeed anticompetitive practice.

Re:This is no law.

[Anonymous Coward]

The court (Landgericht Essen) decided that it is indeed anticompetitive practice.

... according the the UWG (which may roughly be translated as "Fair Competition Act"), which was passed in 1909.

To be fair, the law was recently completely revamped, but the new version wasn't enacted by the time of this ruling.

... will they ever learn?

[Lorean]

When will they learn that you can't solve everyone problem by adding more layers of legislation.

Re:... will they ever learn?

[Jadrano]

When will they learn that you can't solve everyone problem by adding more layers of legislation.

This is insightful?? It has been pointed out in countless other threads that this is not about legislation, but the about the application of existing laws. The laws that had been applied in this case are from 1909, when Germany still had an emperor - certainly not a good occasion for complaining about "more layers of legislation" being added.

Human Translation

[dirt_puppy]

Court: Search enginge spamming by HTML Metatag is against buisiness regulations

Listing several hundred metatags like in a dictionary wihtout any connection to a web page would lead to manipulation of search enginges and is against buisiness regulations of 1 of "Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb" (Law against unfair competition). This was decided by the Landgericht Essen (District Court?) in a now-published decision. [...]

In the arguments of the court, this usage of search keywords leads to search engines bringing those pages to top and being visited by users more frequently. When using hundreds of dictionary-like words, that even with trying didn't show any connection to the goods and services presented in a page, the hoster can't be after presenting his offer optimally. This would only leave the conclusion that the weaknesses of search engines are taken advantage of to gain an advantage in competition.

This wouldn't apply to any use of Meta Tags according to the judges. A competitor would have to endure a web page with keywords that are in connection to the offer of the hoster in a wide sense. The same applies to the use of names, Geschäftsbezeichnungen [?] or labels, if those are "part of commercial links on the web page", to make business with commercial partners possible.
[...]

The abbreviated parts are rather internal to Germany and not of interest for this discussion.

Looks like another job for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't Google and other search engines rank pages higher when :

1) Metadata tag words are actually also found in the body, lower when they are not.

2) There is a reasonable (going to take some tests & tweaking) ratio of metadata tag count to html body word count, lower when there is not.

Google could provide a toggle to turn this feature on-off in their advanced search.

Posted here as AC as I found no quick way to find an email address owned by google.com where users can suggest ideas!

Flash illegal already?

[paragon_au]

In the USA*, don't websites have to conform to a standard that allows blind to listen to the words on a site using text-reading software?

To the best of my knowledge fash does not have a function to read text allowed, and would thus be breaking this law in a flash-only site.

*I live in Australia so not quite sure of the exact law.

Re:Flash illegal already?

[amber_of_luxor]

In the USA*, don't websites have to conform to a standard that allows blind to listen to the words on a site using text-reading software?

Section 508

Required only for goverment agencies,and companies with contracts to do business with the government --- except in the Ninth Judicial District.

Amber

Rock on German courts.

[taosk8r]

I hope this sort of thing makes its way over here. It would be so nice if the web could reclaim some part of the usefullness of standard (non google) search engines. OTOH, I wish more innovative ideas about how to improve search engines were making it to market. It seems like there have got to be tons of ideas out there (a few even bouncing around in my own head) to make search more effective and relevant (and less prone to such crap as googlebombing).

Here are a couple of things I've recently located that seem to be heading in the right direction:

http://www.fybersearch.com/ (may be temp down, but was up yesterday)

http://home.eurekster.com/

http://www.nextaris.com/

Re:Question about public non-Internet networks

[Jadrano]

The ruling doesn't have anything to do with the Internet in particular. Something similar would be applied to any kind of deceptive advertisement of a commercial offer, whether on paper or in any kind of old or new electronic system.
One difference between the Internet in the "good ol' days" and today's Internet is that it used to be less commercialized, and such regulations about business practices ("unfairer Wettbewerb") are irrelevant for non-commercial websites.

Re:This is why Europe is old and tired

[Jadrano]

They don't even believe in free speech.

If your conception about free speech is putting deceptive meta-tags that don't have anything to do with the content on commercial websites, you probably haven't understood this principle.
By the way, this doesn't have anything to do with differences between Europe, America and other continents (are you allowed to sell products with deceptive labels, e.g. water labeled as vodka, or to lure people to your store by wrongly claiming in advertisements that you sell a certain product for a low price although?)