California Packing Corp. v. Sun-Maid Raisin Growers of California

This is a suit in equity for an injunction to enforce trade-mark rights in certain food products. The litigants are competitors engaged in marketing the same lines of merchandise. Plaintiff is a New York corpora-' tion and defendant is a California eo-opera-tive association of raisin growers in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Diversity of citizenship thus appears and the amount in controversy exceeds the necessary jurisdictional sum.

The action unlike most suits to enjoin infringements of trade-marks is not founded upon fraud. The plaintiff cannot in the light of the evidence claim that defendant is seeking to take advantage of a competitor’s reputation by imitating its trade-mark. That there is no actionable similarity between the two trade-marks in suit will readily appear from an ocular inspection of the trade-marks of the plaintiff and defendant respectively. The trade-mark of plaintiff company consists of the hyphenated word “Sun-Kist” in block letters of varying sizes sometimes employed with a drawing of the sun with its rays projecting or diffusing into the block lettered word, while the defendant’s trade-mark is a composite arrangement comprising the pie-* torial…