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

[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

[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

[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

[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 :-)

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!

[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!

[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

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?

[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.

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)

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.

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.)

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?

Man

[foidulus]

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

While we are at it

[levik]

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

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.

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?

[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?

[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.)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..?

Thank God!

[Pan T. Hose]

It will disappear now, just like Marijuana.

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.