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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.
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.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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?
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.
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.)