{"id":11144,"date":"2012-06-30T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/06\/30\/us-copyright-office-yoga-poses-can-t-be-copyrighted\/"},"modified":"2012-06-30T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-30T12:00:00","slug":"us-copyright-office-yoga-poses-can-t-be-copyrighted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/06\/30\/us-copyright-office-yoga-poses-can-t-be-copyrighted\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S Copyright Office: Yoga Poses Can’t Be Copyrighted"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source<\/a><\/p>\n

UNITED STATES, June 28, 2012 (Business Week): The U.S. Copyright Office says that a sequence of yoga poses can’t be copyrighted. In a release published in the Federal Register on June 22, the Copyright Office found that “a selection, coordination, or arrangement of exercise movements, such as a compilation of yoga poses, may be precluded from registration as a functional system or process.” The policy statement acknowledged that the question of whether a sequence of “preexisting exercises, such as yoga poses” can be copyrighted has “occupied the attention of the Copyright Office for some time.”
The policy statement refers to the eight categories of works that the federal copyright law specifically names for protection, including “pantomimes and choreographic works.” Because “exercise is not a category of authorship,” the Copyright Office said in its statement, a “compilation of exercises” can’t be copyrighted.<\/p>\n

The question has dogged many in the yoga community. Last year, Bikram Choudhury, the eponymous owner of Bikram’s Yoga College of India, brought several suits attempting to enjoin former instructors from teaching yoga that incorporated elements that he used, including a hot studio and the sequence of poses. In the litigation, the defendants submitted an e-mail from Laura Lee Fischer, who was at the time the acting chief of the office’s Performing Arts Division, stating that yoga sequences couldn’t be copyrighted. The new policy statement was a result of that e-mail. David Carson, the general counsel of the Copyright Office, said in a telephone interview that once the e-mail from the office surfaced in the litigation — and it was at best an incomplete statement — we felt like we needed to set the record straight.” Carson added that the Copyright Office wasn’t seeking comment on the statement because it isn’t a proposed regulation. The statement clarifies “our practice.” The case is Bikram’s Yoga College of India LP v. Yoga to the People Inc., 11-cv-07998, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source UNITED STATES, June 28, 2012 (Business Week): The U.S. Copyright Office says that a sequence of yoga poses can’t,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}