CONFIRMEDthe trademark register and the examiner’s refusalINFERENCEwhat the record means for a franchise built on the name
USPTO Trademark Status and Document Retrieval (TSDR) records for nine BAM Franchising applications and registrations, 2011 to 2026; the examining attorney’s office actions of May 20, 2024 and February 25, 2025, and the company’s August 20, 2024 response, serial No. 98092350. All documents are public records, on file with this site. The takeover record is in the Keizer file.
On February 25, 2025, an examining attorney of the United States Patent and Trademark Office refused to register BRICKS & MINIFIGS on the ground that the name is generic: not a brand that points at one seller, but the common name of the goods themselves. To prove what the words mean to the public, the examiner attached the dictionary entries for mini and for fig, the fan press of the LEGO world, a dozen competitors selling minifigs as an ordinary word, and then the company’s own pages: its homepage, its Instagram, its franchisees’ storefronts, each using minifig as the name of the merchandise. The refusal is not final, and the company is fighting it. But the oldest concessions in the file are the company’s own. Across fifteen years of filings, BAM Franchising, Inc. has stated on the public record that it claims no exclusive right to MINIFIGS, none to BRICKS, and none to BRICKS AND MINIFIGS. A franchise is, at its legal core, a paid license to a name. This is the registry record of the name.
Genericide is how a brand name dies of success: used so widely for the thing itself that it becomes the common name of the goods, the way aspirin, escalator, cellophane, thermos and the murphy bed each stopped being anyone’s property. A name can also be born generic, assembled from words the public already uses for the goods, and never function as a brand at all. The examiner’s file takes the second view of this one. The company’s own filings have been spelling the same conclusion since 2011, one word at a time.
The same August 2024 response also swears that “BRICKS & MINIFIGS has become distinctive of the goods/services through the applicant’s substantially exclusive and continuous use of the mark in commerce.” The disclaimer of BRICKS and the oath of exclusivity are in the same document, signed the same day, by the same attorney.
By 2014 the company held three registrations on the Principal Register: the circle logo and two versions of BRICKS & MINIFIGS REBUILD, REUSE, REIMAGINE!, Reg. Nos. 4370630, 4461171 and 4461172. A federal registration is kept alive by one periodic filing, a declaration under Section 8 that the mark is still in use. The company had made its six-year filings in 2019, and the office accepted them. The ten-year deadline came next. The office emailed its courtesy reminders for all three registrations on January 7, 2023. That November, the office recorded the company’s renewal of its Supplemental Register registration, the one on the second shelf. The Section 8 declarations for the three Principal Register marks were never filed. On February 2, 2024, the logo registration was cancelled. On July 22, 2024, the other two were cancelled together, the same day, the same reason, each carrying the same status line: “Registration cancelled because registrant did not file an acceptable declaration under Section 8.” In under six months, every right the company held on the Principal Register was dead of unfiled paperwork. The registration it renewed that year was the one that says the name is not a brand.
The refiling had already begun: a new application for the name in stylized lettering in July 2023, then BRICKDAY PARTY, then the bare word BAM, then two applications for REBUILD, REUSE, REIMAGINE. The new application claimed ownership of the old registrations. The February 2025 office action answered with the registry: “USPTO records show that the claimed registration is cancelled.”
The first refusal of the new application, on May 20, 2024, found the name merely descriptive. The company answered with the disclaimer of BRICKS and a claim of acquired distinctiveness, which the office’s next action summarized: a “claim of substantial and exclusive use for over 10 years based on the amount of stores applicant owns, the extent of it’s [sic] marketing and advertising spending, and the prior registration 4255472 on the supplemental register for ‘retail toy stores’.” Store counts, advertising budgets, and the second-shelf registration: that was the case for the name.
Each part of that case had been answered before the company existed. The 1921 aspirin opinion belongs to Judge Learned Hand, who served more than half a century on the federal bench and is often called the greatest American judge never to sit on the Supreme Court. He reduced genericness to the single question the office still asks: “What do the buyers understand by the word for whose use the parties are contending?” On effort and expenditure, the same opinion: “it makes no difference whatever what efforts the plaintiff has made to get them to understand more.” The Supreme Court, freeing the name shredded wheat in 1938, acknowledged goodwill “widely extended by vast expenditures in advertising persistently made,” and answered: “But that is not unfair. Sharing in the goodwill of an article unprotected by patent or trade-mark is the exercise of a right possessed by all — and in the free exercise of which the consuming public is deeply interested.” And in 1940, Hand named the exact theory the company would file eighty-four years later: the danger “that we may be merely granting a monopoly, based upon the notion that by advertising one can obtain some ‘property’ in a name.” The February 25, 2025 action applies the same line of law and escalates the refusal from descriptive to generic: “generic terms cannot be rescued by proof of distinctiveness or secondary meaning no matter how voluminous the proffered evidence may be.” It adds that the company’s claim of acquired distinctiveness “is a concession that the mark sought to be registered is merely descriptive.”
Then the action turns to the company’s evidence, piece by piece. The oath of exclusivity: “applicant has not demonstrated exclusive use of the wording MINIFIG,” against the attached competitor pages selling minifigs by the thousand. The Supplemental registration offered as proof: “a mark on the supplemental register cannot be used to support a 2(f) claim,” and it “carries little to no probative evidence” of distinctiveness. The company’s fallback, that it at least owns the abbreviation, minifig as opposed to minifigure: “the intentional use of a common abbreviation of FIG for FIGURE does not meaningfully change the meaning or commercial impression of the wording.” And on what the words mean, the examiner invoked the rule that an applicant’s own usage can be “the most damaging evidence” of genericness, and attached the company to its own refusal: bricksandminifigs.com, the company’s Instagram, and the buy-sell-trade pages of its Charlottesville and Falls Church franchisees, each using minifig as the name of the goods in the aisle. The company answered on August 25, 2025. The application sits with the examiner now.
Nine applications across fifteen years, and the living estate is this. The words of the name: one registration, on the Supplemental Register since 2012, MINIFIGS disclaimed, and now cited by the office as evidence against the company’s own claim. The name in stylized lettering: refused as generic, pending. The three old Principal Register marks: cancelled, 2024, unfiled paperwork. REBUILD, REUSE, REIMAGINE: allowed in July 2025, abandoned on February 23, 2026 when no statement of use was filed, revived by petition on March 23, 2026, and running on purchased extensions of time to prove the slogan is used at all; the second extensions were granted July 20, 2026. BRICKDAY PARTY: pending on its own extensions. And one trademark on the Principal Register, registered December 2, 2025, for construction toys: the three letters BAM. The initials are the estate.
What a franchise sells is, in large part, the exclusive right to a name; the name over the door is the thing a franchisee pays for. The brand under which an Oregon franchisee’s store was taken over in November 2024 is walked, document by document, in the Keizer file. Trademark scholarship’s standing warning about treating names as property in themselves comes from Mark Lemley of Stanford, the most cited intellectual property scholar in the world, whose work the Supreme Court has cited nineteen times; his article on the subject is titled The Modern Lanham Act and the Death of Common Sense. “Trademark law protects source identification; it does not allow people to own designs or phrases outright and to prevent their use regardless of context.” The registry record above is that principle applied to one name. The law still protects the company’s logos, and its right not to be impersonated. The two words standing alone have never been registered on the Principal Register: not in 2011, when they were moved to the second shelf, and not since.
In fairness: an office action is not a final ruling. The company has answered the genericness refusal, the application remains pending, and the company may yet prevail before the examiner or on appeal to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. Its strongest argument comes from the same case line the examiner cites: under USPTO v. Booking.com, a composite name is judged by what it means to consumers as a whole, and a whole can be a brand even where its parts are generic. A disclaimer, by statute, does not surrender whatever rights the company holds in the name as a whole. The Supplemental registration is live, renewed, and confers real rights. Nothing in the record limits the company’s use of its name, logos, or slogans in commerce, and there is nothing improper in filing, maintaining, or arguing trademark applications; that is ordinary lawyering. The lapses and the abandonment are administrative facts; they establish missed filings, not intent.
Set the two files side by side. In one, the name: refused as generic on the Principal Register, parked thirteen years on the Supplemental, every word of it disclaimed somewhere in the company’s own filings. In the other, the word: minifig, in the dictionary, in the fan press, in the competitors’ aisles, on the company’s own homepage. The examiner’s file says the word belongs to the language. The company’s file, read in order, agrees one word at a time.
As of July 20, 2026, the company was still asking the office for more time.
Sources. USPTO TSDR status and document records, all public: Reg. No. 4255472 (BRICKS & MINIFIGS, Supplemental Register; filed June 17, 2011; amended to the Supplemental Register October 13, 2012; registered December 4, 2012; disclaimer “MINIFIGS”; renewal recorded November 16, 2023). Reg. No. 4370630 (circle logo; disclaimer “BRICKS AND MINIFIGS”; cancelled February 2, 2024, Section 8). Reg. No. 4461171 and Reg. No. 4461172 (registered January 7, 2014; Section 8 six-year declarations accepted August 15, 2019; courtesy reminders emailed January 7, 2023; cancelled July 22, 2024, Section 8). Serial No. 98092350 (BRICKS & MINIFIGS, stylized; nonfinal office actions May 20, 2024 and February 25, 2025, the latter signed by Examining Attorney Christopher Ladner, Law Office 112; applicant’s response, disclaimer of “BRICKS,” and Section 2(f) declaration August 20, 2024; response to the genericness refusal entered August 25, 2025). Serial No. 98583627 (BRICKDAY PARTY). Reg. No. 8046031 (BAM, registered December 2, 2025). Serial No. 98816127 and Serial No. 98816183 (REBUILD, REUSE, REIMAGINE; notices of allowance July 22, 2025; abandoned February 23, 2026; revived March 23, 2026; second extensions granted July 20, 2026). Quotations are from the February 25, 2025 office action, the August 20, 2024 response, and the TSDR status records, on file with this site; the examiner’s attachments listed above are itemized in the two office actions. On genericide: Bayer Co. v. United Drug Co., 272 F. 505, 509 (S.D.N.Y. 1921) (aspirin; both Hand quotations verified against the reporter text); Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111, 122 (1938) (shredded wheat; quotations verified against the reporter text); Haughton Elevator Co. v. Seeberger, 85 U.S.P.Q. 80 (Comm’r Pat. 1950) (escalator); DuPont Cellophane Co. v. Waxed Products Co., 85 F.2d 75 (2d Cir. 1936) (cellophane); King-Seeley Thermos Co. v. Aladdin Industries, Inc., 321 F.2d 577 (2d Cir. 1963) (thermos); Murphy Door Bed Co. v. Interior Sleep Systems, Inc., 874 F.2d 95 (2d Cir. 1989) (murphy bed); USPTO v. Booking.com B.V., 591 U.S. 549 (2020); S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. v. Johnson, 116 F.2d 427, 429 (2d Cir. 1940) (Hand, J.; quotation verified against the reporter text). Scholarship: Mark A. Lemley, The Modern Lanham Act and the Death of Common Sense, 108 Yale L.J. 1687, 1696–97 & n.40 (1999) (all quotations verified against the Yale repository text); Ralph H. Folsom & Larry L. Teply, Trademarked Generic Words, 89 Yale L.J. 1323 (1980); Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, Expressive Genericity: Trademarks as Language in the Pepsi Generation, 65 Notre Dame L. Rev. 397 (1990). Lemley’s chair, citation standing, and Supreme Court citation count are from his Stanford Law School profile (“the most-cited scholar in the world in IP law,” cited “19 times by the United States Supreme Court”). On Hand’s standing, the standard biography: Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge (1994); Hand served on the federal bench from 1909 until his death in 1961. The takeover record: the Keizer file. The wider record: the map.
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