Yoga Ownership & Developing Countries

The Skinny on this article: India is copyrighting all their known historical yoga moves to US yoga teachers can't copyright them.

My opinion: While I agree that a fitness instructing coyrighting a system of moves can help prevent Joe Average Sucks at Fitness from harming people with Joe's Made Up Move, I assume the larger motivation is protecting people's *Fitness Empires.* I think you should be making money off the fact that you are good at what you do, and people want to do yoga with you; and not because you came up with this Genius way of Putting Yoga Moves (which you did not invent) together.

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ARTICLE FROM USA TODAY:

Bikram Choudhury, the self-proclaimed Hollywood "yoga teacher to the stars," incensed his native country by getting a U.S. copyright on his style of yoga four years ago.

In response, India has put 100 historians and scientists to work cataloging 1,500 yoga poses recorded in ancient texts written in Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian. India will use the catalogue to try to block anyone from cornering the market on the 5,000-year-old discipline of stretching, breathing and meditating.

Bikram, who goes by one name like Bono and Beyoncé, says he sought legal protection for his yoga because "it's the American way. ... You shouldn't be able to teach his Bikram Yoga unless you pay him for a license."

India's counterattack goes way beyond Bikram.

The government wants to thwart anyone who tries to profit from the nation's so-called "traditional knowledge," from yoga to 150,000 ancient medical remedies. India already has successfully challenged one U.S. patent granted to two Indian-born Americans who used the spice turmeric in a wound-healing product. That patent was revoked by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

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That way, when someone such as Bikram tries to get a copyright on yoga moves or patents on ancient medicinal cures, those offices could say: "No, that's not original. They've been doing it in India for thousands of years."

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Developing countries are keeping an eye on what India is doing.

As corporations and researchers scour the globe for medical cures from plants or animals, or materials to use for genetic engineering, countries are beginning to try to protect their traditional knowledge.

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Shaw of Yoga Fit backs Bikram's move. She says she's "put a trademark on everything I've ever done since day one." Right now, she's involved in a couple of litigation cases with former employees who are teaching her style of yoga, she says.

Why legal protection?

"This is an industry of rip-off people," she says. "There's not a lot of integrity in the fitness business."