The Fine Bros Drop Plans For Trademark
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The Fine Brothers, famous for their ‘reaction videos’, have dropped plans to trademark the term ‘reaction video’.
What this would have meant was that any video containing the term ‘react’ could have potentially been taken down.
Obviously, the internet wasn’t happy. This decision was met with HUGE backlash, as they lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers within a few hours. The two YouTubers have apologised in a blog post, and retracted all claims to trademark the phrase.
Their videos manage to accumulate over 1 million views per video, so it’s rather disconcerting to see so many of their viewers unsub.
The duo responded to criticism that licence agreements could be used to police YouTube, which has always been a problem. Prime examples include TotalBiscuit, when his content was almost pulled because of a particular review he gave on a certain awful game, when the game creator claimed TB had used gameplay footage without permission.
Another example would be quite recently, when monolith Sony decided to try and trademark the term ‘Let’s Play’.
For those who don’t know what Let’s Play’s are, it’s essentially when a YouTuber plays a game for you to watch. Hundreds of YouTubers use it as a format for content, including Achievement Hunter, who actually have an entire channel called Let’s Play. If Sony had trademarked it, that channel would have come down, and thousands of videos would have been policed and potentially taken down.
*EXPLICIT CONTENT*
Policing YouTube is always a touchy subject. Because as people want content, you never know who is going to be using content that isn’t theirs, or simply re-uploading videos without permission.
For now though, YouTube is at peace.
Until PewDiePie trademarks screaming at the smallest jump-scare.