The Fine Brothers are YouTube celebrity producers, for good reason. Their series of "Elders React" and similar "reaction videos" caught fire for their quirky, timely, and often hilarious videos.

But now the Fine Brothers have crossed from celebrity to infamy, in the eyes of many YouTubers, after a bid to license its format and make money from other popular "react" videos.

For YouTube, and the content producers that dominate the site, the line between giving producers the credit and revenue they deserve and overreaching with copyright law has become quite hard to delineate, if the Fine Brothers' recent controversy is any indication.

It started last Tuesday, as the BBC recapped, when the team of YouTube video producers and brothers announced a new project called "React World."

They made a case (however unconvincing it was) that React World would allow other video makers to license "their format," and join the "react" family, with Benny and Fafi Fine offering tips, tools, networking, and exposure to up-and-coming producers. Of course, part of the licensing scheme would give a portion of any revenue created by those "react" videos to the Fine Bros.

YouTube, Reddit, and every other hive from which Internet content spawns, went berserk. Rumor spread that the Fine Bros. had trademarked the word "react," itself, which the brothers confirmed and explained in a follow-up video. It was just a matter of protecting their brand, they said in the follow-up, but critics continued to suspect that the Fine Brothers had sold out to big business -- ready to strike down anyone's video that infringed on its broad "react" trademark.

Later, in an attempt to further clarify their React World project, the brothers posted on Facebook. "We are in no way claiming reaction content in general is our intellectual property," they wrote. "We are not going after / shutting down / suing anyone who makes reaction-based content."

Eventually, they took down the React World video, scrapped those plans, posted an apology to Medium, and rescinded their trademark on "react." The damage was already done, though. As of a week after the Fine Brothers' first announcement of React World, their channel has lost more than 170,000 subscribers.

Did the Fine Brothers deserve such a huge, negative... "reaction"?

Probably not. Given a modicum of "the benefit of the doubt", it seems like Benny and Rafi simply did a terrible job of communicating exactly what original ideas from their reaction series they wanted to protect, and exactly whom or what they wanted to protect those ideas from. Is it so bad that the Fine Brothers want to, say, be paid if Ellen DeGeneres creates a reaction video? Probably not, though the case they eventually made for protecting their specific format and branding probably doesn't apply to that.

What the firestorm of reactions to React World really shows, in the end, is something that YouTube producers have known for a long time:

Copyright protection goes overboard all the time, with legitimate fair use cases being struck down without much community input or clear, fair routes for YouTube creators to appeal the decision.

At the same time, YouTube creators are often frustrated having their content ripped off -- notably by Facebook celebrities -- but elsewhere on YouTube, Vine, and other digital channels.

Unfortunately for them, the Fine Brothers somehow put themselves right smack in the middle of those two opposite tensions, which really boils down to how YouTube, Facebook, and other digital platforms have sloppily treated their copyright standards.