Doug Polk Forced to Remove HSP Videos from YouTube

Doug Polk has recently been entertaining and instructing poker fans with his break-down of the play involved in the once popular TV show High Stakes Poker, which ran from 2006 to 2011. However, the 28 year-old pro has fallen foul of the show’s distribution rules and has now been forced to remove 17 such videos from his YouTube channel.
As one of the most skilled No Limit Hold’em specialist in the game, the 2-times WSOP bracelet winner saw the number of fans tuning in to watch his video analysis segment soar to 68,000 subscribers. Unfortunately, it seems Polk failed to seek the approval of the Game Show Network (GSN) in advance, with the TV channel then apparently accusing him of using unauthorized content.
Despite having now followed its instructions, however, Polk still maintains that by using the videos for purely educational purposes that he had subsequently broken no rules. Elaborating further, Polk explained:
“I believe I am firmly in the right here on this issue. You can take content, you can take videos and, if what you’re doing to them is transformative, you know, makes it into entirely new content for comedy or educational purposes, or for several different things, then using those clips, using that video falls under fair use.”
What Polk is describing here is a US legal doctrine called fair use, whereby copyrighted material can be used to a limited extent without first receiving authorization, as long as it is used for a number of specific purposes, with the list including commentary, criticism, news reporting, and parody. One person who regularly looks in on Polk’s videos, Bill Perkins, doesn’t seem to agree with Polk’s point of view, though, and has stated that by profiting from the material Polk was no longer adhering to the terms of the fair use trademark law. In fact, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, always the prop bettor, has even offered odds of 3 to 1 that he is right on the issue.