Celebrity-Yogis like Bikram Choudry claim copyright of certain sequences of Yoga postures. That’s kinda like Wilt Chamberlain patenting his favorite, ehem, postures; but while the Kama Sutra has yet to establish priority, India’s Traditional Knowledge Library is placing all known yoga asanas into the public domain.
Nine well known yoga institutions in India have helped with the documentation. “The data will be up online in the next two months. In the first phase, we have videographed 250 ‘asanas’ — the most popular ones. Chances of misappropriation with them are higher. So if somebody wants to teach yoga, he does not have to fight copyright issues. He can just refer to the TKDL. At present, anybody teaching Hot Yoga’s 26 postures has to pay Choudhury franchisee fee because he holds copyright on them,” Dr Gupta added.
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February 10, 2011 at 12:32 pm
Ben H
There are many ‘copycat’ hot yoga classes where they do *almost* the exact same thing as the Bikrim hot yoga classes with very minor variations. It would be interested to analyze the premium people pay for the name value. I suspect that there might be a quality issue though: people will perceive that “real” Bikram classes are higher quality (and they may be, via some sort of certification process).
It’s similar to branded drugs vs. generic drugs……
September 19, 2014 at 7:04 am
yoga poses
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