Seattle food truck business guilty of reverse domain name hijacking

Panelist says company omitted key information about the status of its trademark.

A company that runs a Seattle food truck directory has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking (pdf) after it tried to take a similar .org domain name away from a competitor.

East Coast Renaissance, LLC, which operates SeattleFoodTruck.com, filed a UDRP against the domain name SeattleFoodTrucks.org. The Complainant owns many similar domains for defensive purposes.

SeattleFoodTrucks.org is run by StreetFoodFinder. The company owns many similar domains, including dallasfoodtrucks.org and miamifoodtrucks.org, that it uses to connect local consumers to food trucks.

The Complainant filed a trademark application for Seattle Food Truck.com last May. It has not been issued yet. As panelist Robert A. Badgley summarized:

In its March 6, 2025, Complaint and again in its March 20, 2025, Amended Complaint, Complainant described this USPTO application as “currently pending”. Complainant failed to mention in either pleading, however, that on December 16, 2024, the USPTO had issued a Nonfinal Office Action which stated that Complainant’s trademark application was being “refused because the applied-for mark is primarily geographically descriptive of the origin of Applicant’s services”.

It appears that Complainant has responded to the USPTO’s Nonfinal Office Action, and hence in that strict sense Complainant’s application is still “pending”.

Badgley ultimately found reverse domain name hijacking because he said the Complainant made a “misleading omission about the status of its USPTO application.”

On the merits, Badgley determined the Complainant didn’t show that the registrant lacked rights or legitimate interests in the name:

The Panel concludes that Respondent has a legitimate interest in respect of the Domain Name. As argued above by Respondent and as addressed in the USPTO’s Nonfinal Office Action, the words “Seattle food trucks” (or “truck” in the singular) are largely descriptive, and hence more likely to be used legitimately by multiple parties. On this record, the Panel finds that Respondent registered the Domain Name – simultaneously with 20 other domain names – for its descriptive quality, and not in order to trade off the purported fame of another party’s trademark. For several years after registering the Domain Name, the record shows that Respondent has in fact been using the Domain Name to host a website offering services described by the words contained in the Domain Name. There is simply no reliable evidence of Respondent targeting a trademark in this record.

Badgley also found that the registrant didn’t register and use the domain in bad faith.

Lasher Holzapfel Sperry & Ebberson represented the Complainant, and John Berryhill, Ph.D., Esq. represented the domain name registrant.