# A word for a product category can describe the services built around it

> A term that names a category of products can describe broadly identified services built around them; BIOINPUT refused for agricultural services.

Published 2026-09-15 · Updated 2026-10-21

Canonical: https://distinctive-mark.com/rulings/in-re-agbio/

When a term is an industry's name for a category of products, the Board keeps finding it merely descriptive of consulting, research, software and advice broadly identified in that field, even though the term does not name the services. A broad identification is presumed to include services about those products, and a term descriptive of any service it encompasses is refused. Fusing two descriptive words into one, without a new or incongruous meaning, does not make a mark unitary.

The decision is non-precedential and rests on a record showing the term used around research, consulting, advice and data analysis. Third-party registrations without both elements carried little weight. Procedurally, an applicant that does not argue a class in its brief forfeits the appeal for that class, and offering to delete the class in the brief comes too late. In the editors' view, the lesson is to test a proposed mark against the vocabulary of the products the services revolve around, and to make any deletion while the application can still be amended.

In In re AgBio LTDA, the Board affirmed the refusal of BIOINPUT in Classes 5, 35, 42 and 44 (slip op. at 1–2, 17). Class 5 fell by waiver (at 2–3). "Bioinputs" named biological agricultural products that were the subject of the identified services (at 6–12, 14–16); the merged term was not unitary (at 12).

**Foreign evidence:** some of the examining attorney's internet evidence came from foreign sources, including Brazilian ones. The Board considered it because it corroborated US usage (at 6 n.7, citing In re Bayer).