Reaction videos: Careful what you call your YouTube video, the name could be trademarked

​Reaction videos – clips of people watching clips – are massive online. So, when two brothers tried to trademark them, viewers reacted, well, badly

Hello: a clip from the Kids React series shows one child’s take on Adele's hit song

By trying to protect an empire built on our peculiar desire to watch online videos of people reacting to online videos, two online video tycoons are now watching their followers react badly – and it's not good for business. Confused? You may well be, because this is a very modern story of digital hubris and the struggle to make new media pay with old-fashioned hard cash.

The Fine brothers have – count them – almost 14 million subscribers to their Fine Brothers Entertainment network. Their videos, uploaded in their hundreds to YouTube since 2007, have gained almost four billion views. The pair have various channels but their greatest success has been React, in which teenagers, children and old people are shown watching stuff (the video they are watching is typically also shown in the corner of the screen).

Recent additions include “Elders React to Deez Nuts Vine Compilation” (way too long to explain if that means nothing to you) and “Kids vs. Food – Haggis” in which American children try haggis as part of an occasional kids-eat-food series. They are really, really popular and part of a much bigger obsession with reaction videos that dates back to YouTube's earliest days.

But this week the Fines – Benny and Rafi, brothers from Brooklyn in their mid-thirties – announced plans to allow rival reaction video-makers to use some of their style (graphics and music, for example) as part of a React World licensing scheme, which you could compare to the way big TV franchises such as The X Factor are sold around the world.

Nice try, but YouTubers reacted with anger yesterday over fears that the move would allow the Fines to take legal action against anyone who even used the word “react” to label a reaction clip. The Fines have previously attempted to trademark the word alone, as well as the phrases Kids React and Elders React.

In a post titled “Attorneys React”, Ryan Morrison, a US lawyer and specialist in this area, wrote: “If you make reaction videos, which a lot of YouTubers do, you are potentially in a lot of trouble. If you don't make reaction videos, but you care about free speech and keeping the internet safe from ludicrous trademarks, you should be concerned as well.”

A reaction storm kicked up online and, as the Fine network began to haemorrhage subscribers, the brothers reacted to the reaction. “We are not going after/shutting down/suing anyone who makes reaction-based content,” they said on Facebook, but when asked if they would stop someone making a clip with a name such as “Kids React to Red Bull”, they replied: “That is a trademarked show name so, yes, that is correct.”

Such is the power of reaction TV, which exists offline in the hugely successful Gogglebox series on Channel 4. It dates back much further on YouTube. In 2007, a reactions meme emerged from a dark place with the rise of “2 Girls 1 Cup”, a trailer for a stomach-bothering Brazilian fetish film. The trailer itself went viral but it was so shocking that a secondary market emerged for people who refused to watch it, but were happy to laugh at videos of other people watching it.

The videos inspired countless more and the Fine brothers, online video entrepreneurs since 2004, got in on the reaction game in 2010 and haven't looked back.

A lot of their content is pretty basic, but there is, as Gogglebox has shown, something life-affirming in comparing our own reactions to those of strangers.

Or, as the New York Times put it in a possibly over-thinky think piece in 2011: “In a culture defined by knowingness and ironic distance, genuine surprise is increasingly rare – a spiritual luxury that brings us close to something ancient. Watching a reaction video is a way of vicariously recapturing primary experience.”

Like me, you may well be reacting to that with a look of knowingness and ironic distance. So film it and stick it on YouTube – but careful what you call it lest the Fine brothers react with a lawsuit.