NEW ORLEANS— Ronald Sciortino is gearing up for a snowball fight.

In the heat of the Louisiana summer, snowballs are a common sight-the tasty treat, that is. But there is a legal battle brewing over ownership of some popular flavors, like Orchid Cream Vanilla. WSJ's Shalini Ramachandran reports from New Orleans.

The owner of Jefferson, La.-based SnoWizard Inc. calls his company the originator of the "snowball"—a Louisiana summer snack made of super-finely shaved ice and flavored syrup, similar to the snow cone. The snowball-machine manufacturer and flavor supplier offers 144 flavors—90% of which Mr. Sciortino says he makes from scratch in his lab, where tall metal cylinders bubble and dozens of glass bottles of chemicals line the shelves.

"In this business there are innovators and then there are imitators. I'm an innovator," says Mr. Sciortino, who maintains a tidy front showroom with a display of SnoWizard ice-shaving machines dating back to his uncle George Ortolano's 1936 prototype.

Since 1985, Mr. Sciortino has filed about two dozen patent and trademark applications for improvements on Uncle George's electric ice-shaving machine, as well as on widely sold flavors like "King Cake," "Cajun Red Hot," "Orchid Cream Vanilla" and "Hurricane." He once even tried, unsuccessfully, to lay federal trademark claim to the word "snoball"—the spelling commonly used by vendors to market the slushy treat—to help brand his ice-shaving machines.

The filings have drawn the icy wrath of competitors. Fed up with SnoWizard's attempts to win patents and trademarks on popular flavors and what several of them dub common tools of the trade, eight snowball vendors, distributors and manufacturers who had filed complaints against or had disputes with SnoWizard in recent years banded together.

Enjoying the flavored ice at Pandora's Snowballs in New Orleans. Shalini Ramachandran/The Wall Street Journal

The group filed a joint lawsuit in June in federal court in New Orleans, accusing Mr. Sciortino and his company of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a law created four decades ago to prosecute the Mafia. The suit claims Mr. Sciortino and SnoWizard are "attempting to manipulate the snowball market through a scheme to assert exclusive monopoly rights."

The lawsuit consolidates the majority of claims that are still pending into one suit. A trial has been set for January 2013.

Most civil-RICO cases are dismissed by federal courts, says G. Robert Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in RICO cases.

But the suit shows how tempers are boiling over in competition for customers of the popular frozen treat.

To claim civil-RICO is "just absurdity," says Brad Harrigan, a lawyer for SnoWizard. "It's absolutely something out of Monty Python."

Orchid Cream Vanilla snowball

The plaintiffs claim Mr. Sciortino's actions have caused them an unspecified amount of damage.

At SnoWizard, "They rewrite history to suit themselves," says Milton "Bubby" Wendling Jr., owner and CEO of Belle Chasse, La.-based Southern Snow Mfg. Co. He holds up a hand scraper for ice-shaving and cites a 1900 Sears catalog advertisement for them as proof that the snowball industry existed before SnoWizard.

As for Mr. Sciortino's trademarks of many flavors, Mr. Wendling says, "This isn't rocket science; it's just sugar-water flavorings, the same as Kool-Aid."

Mr. Wendling's frosty relations with SnoWizard date to the 1980s, when he testified as a witness against the company in a patent case involving the ice-shaving machine. Things got particularly icy in 2005, when he received "cease and desist" letters from the company ordering Southern Snow to stop using the flavor names "Orchid Cream Vanilla" and "White Chocolate & Chips" and hand over all products bearing those names.

Mr. Wendling was so incensed over the federal trademark SnoWizard won for "Orchid Cream Vanilla" that he says he spent more than $100,000 and four-and-a-half years fighting it, traveling to Alexandria, Va., in 2009 to argue his case in front of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. Judges there canceled SnoWizard's trademark on "Orchid Cream Vanilla," deeming it merely descriptive: Orchid is just a color, they said.

"Hurricane," another federally trademarked SnoWizard flavor, and seven other nonregistered trademarks were deemed generic by a district judge a year later: Hurricane is also the name of a popular drink in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the judge said.

SnoWizard has appealed both decisions.

"These things keep snowballing into the next suit," Mr. Wendling says.

He says it's common for snowball suppliers to copy flavors from one another. "Of course I copied some of their flavors, and they copied some of mine," he says.

Mr. Sciortino disputes that. "There's nothing that SnoWizard has ever copied from anyone else," he says. He adds that he spends a long time thinking up flavor names that will entice customers. "Names have made a tremendous difference in the way they sell," he says.

The plaintiffs argue the electric ice-shaving machine was designed by others, such as Ernest Hansen in 1934, years before Mr. Ortolano, Mr. Sciortino's uncle and SnoWizard's founder, designed his. But SnoWizard says earlier machines never gained widespread use.

Some say that flavors Mr. Sciortino has laid claim to actually belong to them. Mr. Sciortino says that his aunt came up with the recipe for "Orchid Cream Vanilla" and then handed it out to early vendors like Sid Williams, who founded a shop in the early 1940s called Plum Street Snoballs. The current owner of the shop insists Mr. Williams concocted the flavor himself. "I know it's ours," says co-owner Donna Black. Plum Street Snoballs is a plaintiff in the suit and buys its supplies from Southern Snow.

The suit hasn't put a chill on the entire industry. Dozens of eager, perspiring customers waited in line at Plum Street Snoballs on a recent sweltering day, while many more sat under a giant, rainbow-colored umbrella outside the tiny shop, slurping brightly colored mounds of shaved ice. Some were puzzled by the squabbling.

"It's not something you can own," said Sandy Bennett, a 55-year-old math teacher who had just bought a "Dreamsicle" flavored snowball. "It's like owning 'sweet' or 'cold.' It goes against the whole snowball culture."

Mr. Sciortino says he will continue to assert his intellectual property rights, despite the avalanche of accusations. "There's nothing I get more pleasure from than going to the lab and creating a new flavor," he says. "Everyone else is trying to ride my coattails to success."