The German Federal Court of Justice decided that hidden target words within the HTML-text of a website constitute a characteristic use and therefore lead to an infringement of corresponding trademarks.

According to the decision of the German Federal Court of Justice of May 18, 2006, the use of a foreign trademark as hidden target word (meta-tag) within the HTML-text of a website constitutes a characteristic use, as it serves the purpose to lead the user to an asserted website and to indicate to the enterprise advertising there. Thus, if there is a similarity of branches, a confusion with respect to trademarks may occur simply from the fact that a hint to the website of the user of the foreign trademark can be found amongst the found hits of the search engine.

MarkenG §§ 5 II, 15 I, II, IV (German law for trademarks)

1. The commercial use of an external mark as hidden target word (meta-tag) is seen as characteristic use. If the external mark is used to lead the user to a website of its operator, it indicates to the company which advertises there - even if it is not directly realized by the user.

2. In this case, a danger of confusion can even originate from the fact that under the found hits a hint to a website of the operator is exposed after the mark has been typed in as target word into a search engine - depending on the similarity of the sector (guidelines of the court)

German Federal Court of Justice, decision of May 18, 2006, I ZR 183/03

» Back to the news archive for earlier news.