Has anyone else been following the Fine Brothers' ruinous joke of a trademarking bid? Whatever lawyer(s) they consulted for legal advice should probably seek a less ambitious career. Maybe they came up with the idea by themselves and didn't bother to ask anyone with a decent head on their shoulders.
Watching the reactions to the concept of trademarking reactions play out over the last few days has been more than a bit entertaining.
Unfortunately, the original videos have been removed. I can't even find a mirror host of the original announcement, but I did find a mirror of their "update.". I don't imagine it will stay up for much longer.
Here is my favorite satire, and its "update.".
I was watching it as it blew up and this is probably the best resolution one could hope for. I was actually surprised to see the different groups of people I follow on social media respond, including CGPGrey. Once he and Marco Arment commented I knew that things were not going to end the way the fine bros' had hoped. Another thing I noticed was the difference in tone by commentators when they were speaking in short and long form mediums. There were a lot of short tweets/quips that were either dismissive and defensive on behalf of the fine bros or sarcastically mocking of them. Some of these people also did follow up videos/blogs on the situation that were much more calm and took into account nuance and perception. In particular one youtuber with a network of his own Phillip DeFranco did a video after being a little knee-jerk defensive of his fellow content creators on twitter. His follow up video was more interesting and insightful than I had expected and didn't side with the bros. I guess in the age of the forever wars between online 'factions' I have just come to expect hysteria and doubling down of positions no matter how extreme. Don't know exactly what to make of that personal revelation other than that I've become cynical about online discussion that spans many media.
I also found myself making sweeping, cynical statement like "Well, this is how grassroots content production ends!", and I'm quite glad to have been proven wrong. From an idealistic standpoint, YouTube should have immediately pulled the original video and sent the Fine Bros. a message along the lines of "Hi. You can't do that, morons." But this isn't an idealist's world, and their channel brings a lot of traffic (hurr durr, simple logic, sorry). I'd like to think that if people find a way to ruin YouTube, another grassroots video hosting medium that refuses to enforce outlandish copyright claims would emerge, but I'm not sure how well that would work, in practice. The process of upheaval and reestablishment would at the very least take some time.