A hot dog by any other name, including a name similar to a well-known sausage company, is not likely to confuse consumers as long as it is clearly labeled on the packaging, a federal appeals court said in dismissing a trademark and false advertising suit brought by a sausage company.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled Monday to toss the suit that sausage company Parks brought against Tyson Foods over Tyson's line of hot dogs named "Park's Finest." The determination to toss Park's claim upheld a decision from the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and hinged in part on Park's argument that customers might be confused by Tyson's product.
Part of Park's claim, Judge Kent A. Jordan said in the 33-page precedential opinion, was that customers purchasing Park's Finest might think they are buying a sausage, when in reality they are buying "a frankfurter an item consumers may see as inferior."
However, Jordan didn't bite.
"First of all, because the packaging for Park's Finest displays 'a factually accurate, unambiguous statement' that the product is a frankfurter, '[n]o reasonable consumer could be misled by those statements,'" Jordan said. "Second, Parks has undercut its own argument by repeatedly saying both at the district court and before us on appeal that hot dogs and sausages are actually not distinctive. If a frankfurter is a kind of sausage, as Parks suggests, then there is nothing false or misleading."
According to Jordan, Parks was founded in the 1950s by Henry G. Parks Jr., and it became the first African-American-owned company to be publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The company registered for trademark protection in 1970, but the company went bankrupt after Parks, the founder, died in 1989. In 2000, the company entered into a licensing agreement with Deitz & Watson, to make and sell Parks-branded products.
Tyson, which sells Ball Park brand hot dogs, which account for 23 percent of the revenue of all hot dogs sold in the United States, began selling its Park's Finest line in 2014.
The case, Parks LLC v. Tyson Foods, also allowed the court to interpret the meaning of "geographic origin" in Section 1125(a)(a)(B) of the Lanham Act, which is a novel issue for the circuit. Jordan determined that the phrase "refers solely to the place of origin and not to the creator, manufacturer, or any broader conception of the term 'origin.'"
Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott attorney Jeffrey Lewis, who argued for Parks, declined to comment. Tyson's attorney, John Dabney of McDermott Will & Emery, did not return a call for comment.