Hey everyone it’s Nilay – I’m on vacation this week, so the Decoder team is taking a short break. We’ll be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes. To tide you over until Monday, we have a bonus episode from our friends at Vox Media and Eater’s Gastropod about an incredible patent battle in the world of pizza.

I’m serious: One of the biggest fights in the pizza industry took place in US court in the ‘90s — an intellectual property dispute about stuffed crust pizza between Pizza Hut and patent holder Anthony “The Big Cheese” Mongiello.

So much of what we talk about on Decoder comes down to IP lawsuits like copyright or patent disputes, and how judges decide those cases and where the law ends up can steer the course of history. And that’s true whether we’re talking about a line of code, the distribution method of an MP3, or, yes, even stuffed crust pizza.

Links:

Can You Patent a Pizza? — Gastropod
Ivana and Donald Trump Pizza Hut Commercial — YouTube
The Next Big Thing in Pizza? Try 'Stuffed Crust' — NYT
Who Created the Stuffed Crust Pizza? It's Complicated. — Eater
Method of making a pizza — Google Patents

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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Can you patent a pizza?

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