They say spring is the thing.

• Position: Western

For eight years, the North Carolina Spring Water Association has been trying to keep bottlers from calling their product "spring water" unless nature causes it to bubble up on its own. "If it comes from North Carolina and says natural spring water on the label, we just want to make sure that's what it is," says President Robert Plimpton, owner of a spring in Henderson County.

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This year, the association has made some headway in the state legislature. Its bill, packing potential fines for impostor bottlers, made it through the Senate, which sent it to the House. Opposition has come not from the North Carolina Beverage Association, which represents most of the state's large soft-drink bottlers--most also bottle water -- but from out-of-state bottlers and Tar Heel merchants. Andrew Ellen, general counsel of the North Carolina Retail Merchants Association, argues that the legislation would regulate a marketing matter: what to call a product.

Supporters say there's more to it than that. Large bottlers who mislabel products as spring water cut into their sales. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration set the stage for the fight in 1996 when it said products labeled as spring water could come from a well drilled into the underground source of a natural spring. Plimpton considers that cheating...