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You may or may not have heard of the Fine Brothers but you may have seen some of their videos on YouTube namely their reaction videos such as ‘Elders React’ and ‘Teens React’ to name but a few. The format was simple as the name suggests that they filmed different groups of society’s reactions to various content. This gained them millions of loyal subscribers and the format has been replicated by many to measured success most notably the recent reaction videos to the trailers for Star Wars - The Force Awakens.

This lass really loves Star Wars

Now a reaction is a natural thing. You see something. You react to it. And at times depending on the reaction it can be rather funny thus why it’s lucrative to point a camera at someone while they do it.

Now although reacting to things is not a new thing the genre has been building steadily. So what if you could make more money from it. Wait. What about all of the money? Well that’s that the Fine Bros thought they could do.

They thought that they could copyright the reaction video format and bring anyone who wanted to make reaction videos under the umbrella of their new venture ‘React World’ a place where those who wanted to make reaction videos could post them and hand over a percentage of their revenue to the brothers Fine. They even tried to trademark the word ‘react’ as an attempt to assert their dominance. In essence they wanted to license you the right to make reaction content.

They took this even further by issuing takedown notices to other YouTubers content as they believed that they were entitled to do so. As you can imagine this was met by a huge backlash. In the coming days many content creators took to their channels to vent their frustration at this obvious unfairness.

One such awesome YouTuber reaction

Now I can understand that companies have some rights if you use their copyrighted material without license but this was a format. What next is someone going to claim ownership and income of cat videos?

The resulting fallout saw the YouTube pair hemorrhaging subscribers, some posting live streams of their subscriber count rapidly diminishing.

Something had to be said and the brothers posted a follow up video looking rather perturbed saying that everyone had got it wrong and stating what they wanted to do was to provide a platform for those wanting to make reaction videos to join their service and reap the benefits of their expertise and experience when we all know it was about making more money where the truth lies in the fact that you can pick up a camera and film anyone reacting to anything.

Eventually it wasn’t to last. A couple of days ago in a post on Medium the brothers said that they would be abandoning their ‘React World’ project as well as relinquishing all of their react trademarks citing that they had designed a system that could be easily used for wrong.

As a PR exercise this is a massive shot in the foot for their future endeavours and many wonder if they can recover from this. So maybe it’s a little too late to save them.

So what does this mean? Were they right to try and protect their biggest success or did they just go about it in the wrong way? I’m sure that if they were successful other companies would try and clamp down on formats that they believed they owned. And I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ll hear about it. I’d love to hear what you think about this.

Author

Paul Wright

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