That's fair, I suppose. I'm mostly lurking here too.
I was mostly just posting because while it's true that some people might be jumping the gun, I thought some people here were doing the opposite by not being willing to consider less-than-pure intentions being involved here.
But whatever.
Oh God! Natural light!Reposting because I ninja edited and it may have been missed:
Reaction videos inherently live in an extraordinarily dubious space, legally speaking. Most of the ones I've seen are little more than reposts of someone else's content while the "reactor" stares at it. There's very little value-add to justify their existence under Fair Use.
Now, there are some channels that do add enough value to escape the IP police, and FBE always makes sure to cut up the content so that it isn't being reposted as a whole. But the vast body of reactors have absolutely no grounds to stand on for any kind of infringement claim. "How dare you cite me for infringement of your format? I'm too busy sniping views from other people's original content."
Hell, most reactors don't even link to the content they're reacting to, unlike FBE which cites all its sources.
FWIW, I enjoy watching [some of] them, but I am under no illusions about their standing.
edited 3rd Feb '16 1:07:54 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Agree with Fighteer. Fair Use is actually not a right.
In addition to that, the Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen examples the detractors use is paper-thin. In neither of those cases did they call for either video to be removed, and they very easily could have done so themselves. Ellen's video came out not very long after the Fine Bros. technology video. Looking at their post, they were legit ticked and thought they were ripped off. They asked their fans to explain things to Ellen's people but again they didn't call for either video to be removed.
Also, as Fighteer mentioned I think it says a lot some of these flagged videos never bothered giving credit to what they react to, while the Fine Bros. always make it a point to do so.
They were counting on 14 million Youtubers to explain things calmly and rationally to Ellen's legal Team? That... either sounds like blind optimism, a huge misread of the average internet fanbase, or indeed a veiled way of saying "spam their videos with hate comments".
Funny, it's almost like the thing that people do on the Internet when they are incited to anger is spam hate comments. Just like what happened to the Fine Bros. It's almost as if that is a thing that happens independently of the intent, stated or implied, of the celebrity in question.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"To end this (hopefully) on a semi-positive olive branch; one of the guys leading the anti-Reach World backlash actually had a pretty graceful response
to the Fine Bros abandoning their trademarks, telling people that they shouldn't troll the Fine Bros, and that anyone who enjoys their work should feel free to do so, even saying that the Bros are among the best in the react genre.
edited 3rd Feb '16 10:46:48 PM by UmbrellasWereAwesome
World Whosball Champion 1945-1991Reaction = Blind Commentary + Face Cam
It's derived from the depths of Commentary.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.Well now...I have (through the power of Internet searchery) stumbled on exactly what the Fine Bros. meant when they said people were infringing on their formats. And guess what? Someone is infringing on their format.
Introducing South Korean React:
On one hand, there really is no way to pin down a specific "format", since the format is incredibly basic: people watch a video, make comments while watching, and then afterwards give responses and respond to additional questions/feedback.
On the other hand, out of all the other "react" videos I've seen, this channel is the closest to the Fine Bros. overall style and aesthetic that I've ever seen. And I'm not sure how much of that is having a higher degree of polish vs. actively wearing its inspiration on its sleeve.
edited 4th Feb '16 7:54:38 AM by Watchtower
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Go figure.
~IM Boring: Just to be clear, Fair Use is an established legal precedent. The issue with it and reaction videos is that, to qualify for Fair Use, a work must meet any of these criteria:
- It must substantially transform the content, so as to produce a genuinely new work. This covers parodies and the like.
- It must use a portion of the content in such a way as not to effectively reproduce it. Showing clips from a video is fine; showing the whole video is not.
There are a few other criteria, but that's the gist. PIP'ing a video while staring at it is not "substantially transformative".
edited 4th Feb '16 8:38:48 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
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As Watchtower said, the format is rather generic; it's not too much of a leap of logic to say that if that video is ripping off the Fine Bros to the point of illegality (as opposed to merely ripping them off to the point of unoriginality), then LPers with facecam commentary are gonna owe money to guys like Pewdiepie.
edited 4th Feb '16 8:27:22 AM by UmbrellasWereAwesome
World Whosball Champion 1945-1991
Hardly. Someone PIP'ing their face in front of game footage and saying silly things is too generic to be copyrighted. FBE has developed a very specific format around their show and it's much easier to demonstrate infringement with that sort of thing.
So does that mean that any non-FB video that asks a set of people to each individually react to something, asks them questions after the fact, and edits all the footage into something watchable is automatically committing infringement? Because that's a pretty bare-bones format, like singing competition shows with caustic critic panels and audience voting. If they took the logo design and jingle and font and stuff, that would be room for a legit strike.
If you add up the totality of the presentation and it conveys the impression to an impartial observer that it's substantially copying the original, then there is an infringement case. If you've watched any of FBE's videos, it should be fairly obvious what is being talked about.
Jingle, full-screen lead-in, cut to PiP with reactors, intercut elements of the video with each reactor's response, Q&A session afterwards, informational tidbits on the bottom of the screen, outro bumper linking to the reactors with pithy farewell clips. It's a total package.
And this is not just a You Tube thing; it's following tons of precedent in the media world.
edited 4th Feb '16 8:42:56 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The co-optional podcast talked about this during the latest episode and they seem to have a pretty reasonable discussion of it. They start with it so go strait in.
The basic argument seems to be that FB had a very wide reaching trademark, which under US trademark law they they legally had to enforce viciously, that FB have a reputation for threatening to sue people and that their format is to generic for them to claim originality or that it belongs to them. They compare the Reacts format to the First impression format, the face cam scream cam format, or the four person webcam square podcast format. All of which it's argued are basic generic formats that you can't claim to own.
They attribute all of it to FB pretty much becoming part of the standard media machine of Hollywood that many people went to You Tube to get away from.
TB speaks with some authority on this by the way, having studied law in the UK (where things are obviously different but the basic understand helps) and apparently having had talks with his own lawyer about trademarking his own stuff.
edited 4th Feb '16 8:58:30 AM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranTo continue the legal discussion: What Fighteer said about fair use actually is a crude oversimplification. Fair use doctrine has four major clauses; the transformative part is a modern interpretation of one of those, and his other point is a second clause. You can read more on Wikipedia.
However, what is generally regarded as the most critical clause is the concept of "market harm", that the infringement significantly impairs the ability of the owners of the original work to sell and/or distribute that work. The burden of proof here is entirely on the accuser. (Which makes sense; how can you expect the defendant to prove they've been siphoning profits from the other guy?)
The problem here is that online ad revenue makes it very very very hard to provide that kind of standard of proof. Since it's primarily click driven, the accuser has to prove that not only would these many viewers not watch their video in favor of React Video Q, but that enough of them would click the ad supplied on the given day. Which requires them to know which ad would have been shown to which viewer within a certain timeframe...I'm not even sure AdSense tracks that level of detail specifically.
This doesn't mean that they get an automatic out when it comes to infringement. As I understand it, the standard practice in cases where infringement is proven but market harm isn't is for the judge to find infringement did happen...but then set the amount of damages to some ridiculously low number, like ten dollars or something. More or less, it's a way of declaring a copyright lawsuit frivolous without actually declaring it frivolous. (Ain't law fun?) This pushes incentives towards reaching a settlement, as it's the only way you could really recoup money in a courtroom in these cases.
As a result, there haven't been any major cases to establish precedent for ad revenue driven videos, so people naturally push the limits. If it did ever go to a big court case, the key test would be if You Tube or other freely watchable online videos fall under "publicly available information", which does enjoy some fair use protection as per legal precedent. If they do, well, then, reaction videos (as long as they are reacting to online videos) will have a much firmer legal standing.
Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)
Those are good points, but You Tube already allows content owners to enforce copyright claims in the absence of litigable damages; in short, Google's doctrine under which Fair Use applies is much narrower than what your statement above would imply.
The key question is whether a reactor's views are supplanting views of the original content or piggybacking off of them. In other words, are people watching the reaction video in lieu of the original, thus denying the original content views?
FBE works around this by not showing the entirety of the original videos (in most cases) and by linking to the original in the description. Most reactors do neither of these things.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
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And that's the thing, the video being linked lacks a lot of the bells and whistles; there's no text-based information tidbits, no pithy outro, and no sound or other visual effects added in for comedic effect during the interview. It's pretty bare-bones; even the background is just a monotone colored wall. It's not quite Spirit Airlines, but it certainly isn't an business class flight on Japan Airlines.
And that's probably part of the reason the original controversy took off; there's rightfully or wrongfully a lot of dislike on the Internet for modern IP law in general (though more of that has to do with the length of copyrights and whatnot). And even then, there's plenty of stuff on regular media that's pretty blatantly copying off something else even if it isn't technically infringement. In general, I sort of prefer having the prospective audience be the ones to murder unoriginal but not "beat-for-beat" copycats, anyways.
World Whosball Champion 1945-1991
I mean in the sense of "lol, I'm not watching this anymore". My metaphors got away from me for a sec.
EDIT: Though it says something about the crazy state of general online culture that it could be assumed I was advocating about an internet counterattack or the like.
edited 4th Feb '16 9:30:33 AM by UmbrellasWereAwesome
World Whosball Champion 1945-1991

I only commented because of the tumblr thing. I was concurring that it isn't a reliable resource.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?