Forget the hubbub over Napster, or even that inane "one-click" lawsuit between Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. We need to talk about the IP food fight over U.S. Patent 6,004,596.

Hold on to your lunchboxes, Technology Review readers. This legal squabble pits J. M. Smucker, beloved maker of jam, against tiny, Gaylord, MI-based Albie's Foods. For reasons that elude me, Smucker's lawyers decided to try to enforce the firm's exclusive rights to-I'm not making this up-its patented version of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Owning the PB&J sandwich? Talk about an affront to mom and apple pie!

Now, it's the reasoning of the Smucker legal eagles that I really want to address. But I know you levelheaded Technology Review readers will find the notion of a patented PB&J pretty, well, hard to swallow. So before we go further, I invite you to look it up for yourself. (Go to www.uspto.gov/patft and enter the aforementioned patent number.) Then you too can marvel at this U.S. patent, granted in December 1999. You can experience firsthand its claim to a "first bread layer having a first perimeter surface coplanar to a contact surface" and its careful legalistic delineation "wherein said first filling" is "comprised of peanut butter" and a "second filling is comprised of a jelly."