Can a private company control a national park and force the government to rename numerous famous park attractions?

Alyssa Hertel | 2/15/16

Well it sure looks like a private company is about to be allowed this kind of control over a national park. Recently, the National Park Service announced that it would be renaming many recognized attractions in Yosemite National Park.  The attractions include: Yosemite Lodge, which will be renamed Yosemite Valley Lodge; The Ahwahnee Hotel, which will be renamed the Majestic Yosemite Hotel; Curry Village, which will be renamed Half Dome Village; Wawona Hotel, which will be renamed Big Trees Lodge; and Badger Pass Ski Area, which will be renamed Yosemite Ski and Snowboard Area.

The National Park Service’s decision to rename these iconic attractions is in order to avoid potential trademark litigation with Delaware North Company (“DNC”) Parks & Resorts at Yosemite Inc., a company that is claiming ownership to the trade names and trademarks associated with the names of the attractions mentioned.

The potential trademark dispute started back in 2014 when the National Park Service made the decision to open up its concessionaire contract to new bidders. This meant that its concessionaire at the time, DNC, could potentially lose its job to run the hotels, food and beverage establishments, retails shops and other commercial visitor attractions at Yosemite National Park that it has had for just over 20 years beginning in 1993.  DNC ended up losing its two billion dollar bid for the Yosemite concessionaire contract when the National Park Service awarded a 15-year concessionaire contract to Aramark in 2015.

In September of last year when DNC lost its bid to renew its concessionaire contract for Yosemite park attractions, DNC notified the National Park Service that since 2002 DNC had been trademarking various Yosemite park attractions that it had been running during its 20 years as the concessionaire of those Yosemite park attractions.  The trademarks DNC had been actively pursuing and receiving since 2002 were for the names of the various attractions, such as the lodges and hotels, as well as images and designs associated with the park attractions themselves.

However, when DNC lost its 2-billion-dollar concessionaire contract for Yosemite, the National Park Service lost huge as well with DNC claiming ownership of around a dozen trademarks associated with various names and logos used throughout Yosemite Park in association with the parks well-known attractions.

These dozen or so trademarks come at a expensive price for the National Park Service, with appraisals of the trademarks declaring the trademarks DNC owns that are associated with Yosemite Park to be roughly 44 million dollar price tag. However, the National Park Service has only appraised the total value of all of DNC’s intangible property, which includes the trademarks, a database of 750,000 customers, and more than a dozen websites, to be a mere 3.5 million dollars as to compared to the 44 million appraisal by DNC.

The price of the intangible property is important because DNC is saying that when it was awarded its initial concessionaire contract back in 1993, it had a buy out clause, which required the new owner of the concessionaire contract to buy DNCs concessionaire’s assets. In order for DNC to be bought out by Aramark, the sale must include all of the intangible property that DNC own, which comprises all the intellectual property such as the trademarks DNC has associated with Yosemite Park.

In the mean time, the National Park Service intends to avoid any potential trademark disputes with DNC’s trademarks associated with the park, by renaming the attractions by March 1^st, when the new concessionaire contract goes into effect and Aramark gains control of running the attractions.

However, the National Park Service does not intend to roll over and allow DNC to control the running of the park long after DNC no longer has control of the running of the parks attractions. The National Park Service plans to keep fighting for their right to keep and use the original names the park has been using since as early as the late 1800s. The renaming of the parks attractions is a precautionary step to insure that transition to the new concessionaire is smooth and to avoid any serious legal consequences of continuing to use the trademarks without DNCs permission.

The National Park Service plans to continue the fight by looking at two issues: 1) whether or not DNCs trademarks associated with the parks are valid; and 2) what is the value of those trademarks.  The National Park Service hopes the trademarks are not valid because the trademarks are historic names associated with the attractions at Yosemite Park and therefore belong with the people.

This brings up an interesting argument since one of the main purposes of trademark law is to protect the consumers.  If we wish to protect the consumer by allowing companies the right to have exclusive use of a word, name, or symbol that identifies a products or services of a particular source (i.e. a company), then wouldn’t forcing the government to change the name of its historic attractions go against this idea of protecting the consumer?

Long time customers of Yosemite Park would no longer be able to identify the source of the attractions as being from the National Park Services because they would likely be confused as to who the source of those attractions are. And if the consumer were confused as to whom the source of the Yosemite Parks attractions is then allowing these trademarks would undercut the main purpose of trademark law, which is to protect the consumer.

However, this argument is not all that strong because consumers would not really be confused as to whom the source of the attractions is because the attractions would still be located inside the park and most of the renaming of the attractions do not alter the name much.  A consumer would therefore not be confused as to the source of the attractions because while inside the park they would know that the park itself is the source of the attractions. Which also brings up the fact that consumers are probably already confused as to who the source of the attractions are.

Some consumers probably think that the government runs the entire park and therefore is unaware that the government contracts out the running of most of the commercial attractions at Yosemite Park to a third party. This would also be another weak argument for the National Park Services to bring up to try invalidating DNC’s trademarks. No matter the outcome, it’ll be one for the history books.

Photograph by David Iliff – License: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26413820