The State - News from April 1, 1987

A federal judge in Fresno dismissed a lawsuit against the California Raisin Advisory Board by a businessman who claimed that its directors stole his idea of dancing raisins. The decision could allow the board to proceed immediately with plans to sell dozens of such items as T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing the likenesses of the raisin characters, featured in a popular national television ad dancing to the 1960s song, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” U. S. District Judge Robert E. Coyle dismissed the copyright and trademark infringement suit by Robert Reiter of Plattsburgh, N.Y., saying that humanized raisins could no more be copyrighted by the man that first drew them than nude statues could be copyrighted by the artist who first sculpted them.