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Meta-tag Spam Declared Illegal in Germany 192

Posted by Hemos from the about-freakin'-time dept.
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.
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Meta-tag Spam Declared Illegal in Germany More

Meta-tag Spam Declared Illegal in Germany

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  • How can a court enforce the ruling (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stecoop ( 759508 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:59AM (#9919646) Journal
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wikdwarlock ( 570969 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:02AM (#9919674) Homepage
      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 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by vi (editor) ( 791442 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:12AM (#9919759)
      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).

      • 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 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:19AM (#9919819) Journal
      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=
      • 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 t

    • Re:How can a court enforce the ruling (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:24AM (#9919855) Homepage
      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?

    • "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 me

    • 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 sear
    • 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

  • Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beh ( 4759 ) * on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:59AM (#9919650)
    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".
    • 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:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE! (Score:5, Funny)

      by selderrr ( 523988 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:36AM (#9919952) Journal
      if you outlaw meta tags, only outlaws will have metatags

    • Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:38AM (#9919977) Homepage Journal
      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"
      • 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

        • Re:Please get this whole thing overturned! PLEASE! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @11:24AM (#9920355) Homepage Journal
          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


      • 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 jo
      • 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 t

      • "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.
        • 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.
    • 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.

    • 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.

  • usage of meta tags? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:00AM (#9919659)
    how many search engines actually use meta tags? altavista, google, teoma, yahoo and msn don't support it
    • "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.

    • 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.
    • 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.
  • 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 Wirtschaftsverb

    • Re:In case of slashdotting... (Score:4, Funny)

      by electricmba ( 803872 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:11AM (#9919756)
      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)
    • That's the original text from the Heise site. Shouldn't this be moderated as 'informative'? Stefan

  • Meta tags can be very effective (Score:5, Interesting)

    by caitsith01 ( 606117 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:01AM (#9919671) Journal
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wikdwarlock ( 570969 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:06AM (#9919706) Homepage
      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.
    • 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? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:02AM (#9919675)
    First: Anchor tag illegal (requires license to link)
    Second: Meta tag illegal
    Next: HTML tag declared unconstutional

  • 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?

  • Like banning 5.25" disk notchers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by danamania ( 540950 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:06AM (#9919712)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by foidulus ( 743482 ) * on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:07AM (#9919719)
    will they sue The Onion [theonion.com] for managing to be the first result for a google search for the [google.com]?
    • What gets me, is this: Google [google.com] claims to be searching 4,285,199,774 web pages... And yet that search for the [google.com] gives no less than "about 5,900,000,000" results.

      Methinks Google has a looping web page or two indexed...
    • 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?
    • Only narrowly beating The Whitehouse. [whitehouse.org] :)

  • While we are at it (Score:5, Funny)

    by levik ( 52444 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:07AM (#9919720) Homepage
    Can somebody ban the BLINK tag please? And pages full of CENTERed text?
    • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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

  • Vague (Score:4, Funny)

    by Richard Dick Head ( 803293 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:10AM (#9919737) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fearlezz ( 594718 )
    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? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anita Coney ( 648748 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:20AM (#9919822) Homepage
      The last time I checked Germany never signed the Bill of Rights.

      • No, but just like the US and many other nations, Germany signed the UN declaration of human rights [unhchr.ch]. (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? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ahillen ( 45680 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:35AM (#9919945)
      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?
      • 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? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:51AM (#9920088)
      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.
    • 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 [google.de]).

      There have already been several decisions on the topic wether it is allowed to use your c

    • Re:Freedom of speech? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Asic Eng ( 193332 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @12:48PM (#9921174)
      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.)
    • 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

  • Why and how? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:13AM (#9919763)
    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!
  • 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".
    • 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 resp

  • 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?

    • Re:Freedom of Speech? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by radja ( 58949 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:36AM (#9919958) Homepage
      to me, it sounds more like deceptive advertising.

    • 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.
    • 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.
      • 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?

  • 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.

  • "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.
  • ...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)!
    • 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. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lysium ( 644252 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:26AM (#9919869)
    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. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by reynhout ( 89071 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:26AM (#9919872)
    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. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 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.
    • 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 ;)
  • \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

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

  • Google could eradicate metaspam easily by... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kieckerjan ( 38971 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @10:34AM (#9919934)
    (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? (Score:2, Funny)

    by AnkitS ( 803615 )
    After having conquered the battle against spam, Germany has deceided to declare a war on Slashdot trolls...

  • Question about public non-Internet networks (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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..?
    • 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.
  • 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 e

    • 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)

  • Thank God! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @11:06AM (#9920205) Homepage Journal
    It will disappear now, just like Marijuana.

  • my translation attempt (Score:3, Informative)

    by iwbcman ( 603788 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @11:33AM (#9920465) Homepage

    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 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.
    • 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.

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