An article on January 2, 2015 in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Names of Yosemite’s sacred sites threatened by trademark spat,” describes an intellectual property dispute between the U.S. National Park Service and Delaware North, the company that runs the concessions at Yosemite National Park, over the ownership of such legendary names the Ahwahnee Hotel, Camp Curry, Badger Pass, Wawona Hotel and Yosemite Lodge.
According to the article, the company has trademark registrations for the name, “But attorney Melville Owen of San Francisco, who specializes in trademark law, said the registrations don’t necessarily mean the company owns the names of the sites.
Owen said the trademark belongs to whomever used it first. Should the debate over the names at Yosemite escalate, the courts will look at when and where the names emerged and track down who had the rights to them and what happened to those rights, he explained.
‘It will be fascinating to see how this plays out,’ Owen said. But ‘it doesn’t seem like common sense to allow a concessionaire to own the name of the hotel that it happens to be managing.'”