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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?
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.)