CONFIRMEDeverything below is on the public record: BAM’s own sworn takedown notice, published in the Lumen Database
This is the plain-language version of the cited update, written to be read out loud. The words BAM swore are quoted below, unchanged.
A company called Bricks & Minifigs, or BAM for short, tried to make its own operations manual disappear from the internet. It filed a formal copyright takedown with Cloudflare, the company that carries the website, aimed at bamopsmanual.com, the site that publishes the manual. The takedown is public. Anyone can read it in the Lumen Database, a public library of takedown notices. It is signed by Matthew McNeff, BAM’s chief operating officer. And to file it, he had to swear, under penalty of perjury, that the manual is real and that it belongs to BAM.
A copyright takedown is not a casual complaint. The person who files it swears an oath, the kind you take in court, under penalty of perjury. Matthew McNeff swore that oath, and affirmed that he knew the penalty behind it. In the notice, he describes the manual in his own words:
This is a copy of our private and proprietary franchisee owners manual, it is not intended for public access, as is acknowledged by the site “Its cover states that it is intended for franchise owners only.”
The original document resides in our internal Google Drive, and is not accessible to the public.
CONFIRMEDIn a notice sworn under penalty of perjury, Matthew McNeff, chief operating officer of BAM Franchising, Inc., states the operations manual on bamopsmanual.com is “a copy of our private and proprietary franchisee owners manual.”
For weeks, no one could be sure BAM would admit the manual was real. A company can always say a leaked document is fake, or old, or someone else’s. BAM cannot say that now. An officer of the company swore, on penalty of perjury, that the manual is genuine and that it is theirs. In trying to erase the document, BAM confirmed it is real.
Here is the odd part. It is a copyright complaint, and it names no copyright. The form has a place for the copyrighted work being protected. In that place, the record says “Unspecified,” and it says no original work was submitted. So BAM swore an oath under the copyright law and never said what copyright it was protecting.
On the manual’s front page, a visitor now sees a single line: the material is “unavailable for legal reasons.”
CONFIRMEDVarious sections of bamopsmanual.com appear to remain accessible after the takedown, among them bamopsmanual.com/18a-brand-lego-marks.
This is the second time in a week BAM has tried to bury material about how it runs. The first try, days earlier, was anonymous and unsigned, and this site published it. That one was easy to wave off; an unsigned complaint proves nothing about who is behind it. This one is signed, by a named officer, under oath. An anonymous complaint can be taken back. A sworn one cannot.
In that first try, BAM, over the words “BAM Franchising, Inc. and/or the applicable BAM entity that owns the copyrighted materials,” claimed its own franchisee support portal as private, “BAM-created” material and demanded an archive of it be taken down. That same portal is still sitting open to the public, with no password, on BAM’s own website.
CONFIRMEDBAM’s franchisee support portal is publicly accessible, no login required, at bamfran.freshdesk.com.
This site is independent. It is not owned by, run by, or affiliated with BAM. It quotes BAM’s own filings and the public record the way it quotes all its sources.
BAM had one tool that could take the manual down without going to court, and that tool runs on an oath. So to make a document it calls private disappear, a company officer swore, in public, that the document is real and that it is BAM’s. The takedown did not shrink that record. It became part of it.
This is a plain-language retelling. The exact quotes, the sources, and the links are in the full update. Nothing here is a finding of law.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam