The Fine Bros: How the Internet “Reacted” to YouTube’s Newest Controversy

By Nick Anstett
Opinion Editor

How does one enrage the entirety of the Internet? It seems like a tough task to achieve, but if you are comedy and entertainment duo Benny and Rafi Fine, known as The Fine Bros on YouTube, you learned the tough way this past week that this is a very real possibility.
The Fine Bros are best known on the Internet for the creation of the widely successful “React” series which sees representations of various demographics responding to viral videos, music, media, and more. In 2012, their first and most popular segment “Kids React” won a Day Time Emmy Award for Best Viral Series. Each installment in the series regularly achieved over a million views each with their most popular installments crawling upwards of 40 million hits. The Fine Bros were an Internet titan and one of the most recognizable brands on YouTube.
Enter “React World.” On Jan. 26, The Fine Bros announced the creation of a new business venture that would allow other YouTube channels and creators from around the world to license out visual and creative assets from their series to instill the generation of other “React” related media throughout the globe. While on the surface the concept of “React World” seemed innocent enough, the response from a large portion of the web was livid.

To many the concept of “React World” represented an attempt to corner and control a market of relatively easy to produce and share videos. Soon afterwards, evidence surfaced that The Fine Bros had also trademarked the word “react” itself, and had been responsible for the take down of numerous other similar videos throughout YouTube, despite the fact that many of these contained purely original content. The Daily Dot even noted an instance where a series entitled “Seniors React” was removed from YouTube despite the fact that it existed well before its Fine Bros counterpart “Elders React” was created. Without realizing it, The Fine Bros had morphed into the specter of big business attempting to squeeze the life out of creative content on one of the world’s largest media platforms.
In the span of five days, The Fine Bros lost upwards of 400,000 subscribers and were the subject of parody, mockery, and criticism from fellow YouTubers as well as other online communities such as Reddit. Several live stream videos were even established that would allow viewers to watch the subscriber count for The Fine Bros’ channel drop in real time. Attempts to control the damage on The Fine Bros’ part proved equally disastrous as a follow up video, simply entitled “Update.” was treated with equal levels anger and mockery. As self-proclaimed “video game attorney” Ryan Morrison said, “These guys didn’t come up with the idea of filming funny reactions from kids ,and they certainly don’t own an entire genre of YouTube videos. It wasn’t their idea, and it’s not theirs to own or police.” As the dust settled, The Fine Bros made the decision to release their trademark and discontinue the concept of “React World.” The Internet turned its attention away, and the weekly outrage was dispelled.

The Internet, and I realize that attempting to relegate the entire world wide web into a single noun like that is an over exaggeration, loves a little bit of righteous anger. Just about every day, I’m sure one of us turns to our Facebook feed to find one friend or acquaintance taking part in some new diatribe. Politics, religion, media, or “PC Culture” people love to be mad about things, especially when they can watch media titans lose viewership in real time.
Does it mean that The Fine Bros didn’t deserve the wave of viral vitriol that was lobbed at them for a week straight? Well, yes and no.

While there is a degree of passive-aggressive sadism and mob mentality present in how much of the web reacted, no pun intended, to “React World,” the initial discomfort and anger with the concept itself is not unfounded. YouTube has long been accused of an impenetrable, haphazard, and easily bought system of copyright policing, and the attempts of one of their larger brands to expand upon this appropriately set off alarm bells among fellow creators. There is a certain Wild West attitude present in most internet media that has allowed for a fair share of YouTube creators to thrive and create their own content unrestricted by the complicated legal and conceptual guidelines that hamper other media. It’s part of what has made the platform such a runaway success since its creation in 2005. “React World” itself may have been a relatively harmless business venture, but it posed a conceptual threat to the way the web behaves, particularly to its content creators.
The outrage machine of the Internet may have turned its eye away for the moment, but hopefully live streams of dropping subscriber accounts have made some form of impact. In the meantime, start grabbing trademarks for the words “video,” “watch,” “play,” and “selfie.” There might be some business there.