Yogi maintains position as rivals sue over copyright
The normally sedate world of yoga has been rocked by a court battle between a Beverly Hills guru and rival teachers.
Bikram Choudhury, the most famous yoga master in the United States whose clients include Madonna, John McEnroe and Quincy Jones, is being sued in an intellectual property row over a 26-posture series.
Mr Choudhury said he has copyrighted the sequence of yoga postures and has sent legal letters to teachers of his technique ordering them to stop or face a lawsuit.
But other yoga teachers have hit back with their own suit claiming he has no copyright over what they claim is a 5,000-year-old tradition.
Yoga is big business in the US, drawing an estimated 18 million practitioners in the country and accounting for £15 billion in annual sales, according to Yoga Journal. The Calcutta-born yogi, who popularised the form of yoga known as Bikram, said: “Money is very important. I like money. You like money. But that?s not the end of life. Satisfaction of living, that means mental peace.”
Madonna plays Abby, a Yoga teacher in her film “The Next Best Thing”
He said he has copyrighted the sequence, not the postures. He arranged the poses in a certain way, matched each pose to a precise dialogue used by the instructor and set the 90 minutes of exercises in a mirrored, carpeted room heated like a sauna. That, he says, is his intellectual property.
Now, a San Francisco nonprofit organisation of yoga enthusiasts is countering with a federal lawsuit attacking the guru’s claim that yoga is property.
They say that yoga is a tradition that cannot be owned. The suit is asking the judge to determine whether Mr Choudhury is entitled to copyright and trademark his material under federal copyright laws.
Source: The Scotsman