because I found the idea in this article so startling. Sure, we all knew Bikram wanted to patent his hot yoga set of 26 poses, but the following plans set forth in today's NYT are even more alarming.
Full article here. Excerpt below.
A Big Stretch
I GREW up watching my father stand on his head every morning. He was doing sirsasana, a yoga pose that accounts for his youthful looks well into his 60s. Now he might have to pay a royalty to an American patent holder if he teaches the secrets of his good health to others. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. There’s big money in those pretzel twists and contortions — $3 billion a year in America alone.
It’s a mystery to most Indians that anybody can make that much money from the teaching of a knowledge that is not supposed to be bought or sold like sausages. Should an Indian, in retaliation, patent the Heimlich maneuver, so that he can collect every time a waiter saves a customer from choking on a fishbone?
The Indian government is not laughing. It has set up a task force that is cataloging traditional knowledge, including ayurvedic remedies and hundreds of yoga poses, to protect them from being pirated and copyrighted by foreign hucksters. The data will be translated from ancient Sanskrit and Tamil texts, stored digitally and available in five international languages, so that patent offices in other countries can see that yoga didn’t originate in a San Francisco commune.
It is worth noting that the people in the forefront of the patenting of traditional Indian wisdom are Indians, mostly overseas. We know a business opportunity when we see one and have exported generations of gurus skilled in peddling enlightenment for a buck. The two scientists in Mississippi who patented the medicinal use of turmeric, a traditional Indian spice, are Indians. So is the strapping Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram Yoga, who has copyrighted his method of teaching yoga — a sequence of 26 poses in an overheated room — and whose lawyers sent out threatening notices to small yoga studios that he claimed violated his copyright ...
sigh.. humans are just plain greedy. and it's worse if greed comes from so-called yogis who are supposed to be practicing Simple Living High Thinking, instead of going around suing others for copying what isn't theirs in the first place. Yoga is a gift from Patanjali, and it should be freely shared. If you want to make a business out of it, go ahead. but please maintain that yogi/yogini mindset.
Posted by: isha | May 07, 2007 at 11:07 PM
urgh, this is truly the epitome of U.S. copyright/patent to the extreme.
note to myself: take a deep breath and don't let this bother me, "oooommmmmmm..."
Posted by: Thomas Han | May 16, 2007 at 07:42 AM
It turns out that I have done yoga whole my life. ;)
I love standing on my head nad do it whenever I can.It helpes me think a lot more better after that.
Posted by: Cara Fletcher | July 16, 2007 at 02:14 PM
Bizarre. I can't believe that is true, but then again, people are very sue happy these days.
Posted by: Tim | April 14, 2008 at 08:52 PM
Law, patents and royalties really take out the fun of Yoga. It is very sad when passion is obstructed by a bunch of capitalist practices.
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Posted by: K Amber (Power Yoga Postions FREE) | April 19, 2008 at 07:02 AM
Definitely a case of patent abuse. There seems to be several thousand years of prior art here.
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Posted by: Ayurveda | August 06, 2009 at 03:42 PM
We can just all hope that a good resolution will come out after this entire ordeal. The main point of yoga and other belief systems in the first place is our well-being and better life and attachment to religion or divinity. We can put it this way: these age-old traditions are being challenged to keep up with the today's modern order of things.
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