Roche Fighting For The Tamiflu Name

The pharmaceutical company Roche has won an important legal battle recently regarding the use of two Tamiflu web sites which was resolved by the U.N.'s board of the World Intellectual Property Organisation or WIPO for short. The U.N. WIPO agency said that the web sites buy-tamiflu.net and tamiflupharmacy.net were not being used correctly by a company based in panama that was seeking to drive internet traffic through these sites when they looked for the Tamiflu drug online.

The Tamiflu sites were not selling Tamiflu but were just using the name to drive the internet traffic to other websites that sold things like bird flu masks and a guide named, 'How to protect yourself and your family from H5N1 bird flu'.

This is not the first time that the WIPO has had to intervene with regard to websites illegally using the Tamiflu name and abusing the Tamiflu trademark. The WIPO said that with the Tamiflu name being well known due to a possible worldwide scare of a bird flu pandemic the people using the Tamiflu name were not even interested in selling Tamiflu but were selling other products that had no real benefit and were misleading in their worth to prevent bird flu.

Altogether Roche has filed 34 domain name complaints reagrding the use of the word Tamiflu to WIPO and now 32 have been settled. The Tamiflu name has been especially used in the last few months by rogue internet sellers but other names like Viagra Rogaine and other have been submitted too. The new fast track method of conflict resolution that WIPO administers will transfer the ownership of a domain name in ten days provided that the other party does not file a court case against the decision.