USA, June 17, 2004: (HPI note: This article appeared in the prestigious magazine, the Economist, several months ago.) The term yoga has become mainstream in America. Americans have been trying bikram yoga and ashtanga yoga in popular classes across the land. When Patanjali, a yoga master, wrote his great works in second century BC, he probably never envisioned that the sacred practise would assume a commercial flavor several hundred years later. This is precisely what has happened to Bikram yoga as taught by Bikram Choudhury. The article says, “Just as McDonald’s franchises its branches, Bikram wants to franchise his style of yoga to the more than 900 studios around the world that were started by his former students. To this end, he has trademarked phrases such as ‘Bikram Yoga,’ ‘Bikram’s Basic Yoga System’.” In 2002, Bikram “ordered his lawyers to start sending out ‘cease-and-desist’ letters to Bikram studios, demanding that the owners stop infringing on his alleged property and start paying him money. Last year, Bikram made an example and sued one studio south of Los Angeles.” As most of the yoga studios teaching bikram yoga are small businesses, the owners felt that the only way that they could defend themselves was to form an alliance called Open Source Yoga Unity. The article explains, “In April, OSYU scored an initial victory against Bikram in a federal court in California, establishing its right to represent studio owners and preventing Bikram from going after them one by one before the legal concepts are clarified. Bikram says that he is not, in fact, trying to franchise or copyright yoga as such, only his specific sequence of postures and way of teaching it. Thus he would admit that all the constituent parts of Bikram Yoga — the ‘asanas’ (postures) and ‘pranayama’ (breathing techniques) — have been in the public domain for about 5,000 years, since they were first painted on to caves and temple walls in India. But he argues that these asanas and pranayama are like musical notes or dance steps — public property to begin with, but private property once they form part of a song or ballet. Just as “Swan Lake” is no longer “Swan Lake” if you change its notes and steps, Bikram Yoga no longer delivers its health benefits, he claims, if you mess with his precise formula.
The article goes, “His problem now becomes one of legal logic. If Bikram Yoga is indeed, for legal purposes, akin to ‘Swan Lake,’ Bikram might actually have a case. But Bikram himself does not claim that his classes are performances with inherent artistic or expressive value; instead, he boasts that their purpose is health. In legal jargon, that may make Bikram Yoga a ‘functional’ process, which is an area covered by patent law, not copyright. Bikram has no patents and, even allowing for the eccentricities of America’s Patent Office, no hope of getting any.
The article concludes, it is “like Bikram writing a new recipe for hamburgers and then showing up at barbecues to charge the people flipping the burgers. Intellectual-property law is crucial to economic success. But extending it to yoga will — The Economist’s spiritually enlightened, physically limber journalists hope — prove too much of a stretch.”
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