A few years ago many companies thought that third party trademarks (or company names) may not be used as keyword ads at all, at least not if - and this is the only interesting case - such trademarks protect similar goods or services as their own products. In Germany, this opinion was derived from the Federal Court's (BGH) approach to deal with "Meta elements" (HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page, helping it to be found easily by search engines). The BGH held that using third party trademarks as meta elements for their own products is trademark infringement.  Who could have imagined that keywords are to be treated, differently?

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