NEW YORK, NEW YORK, October 10, 2015 (Deccan Chronicle): Indian-American yoga guru Bikram Choudhury is not entitled to copyright protection over yoga poses and breathing exercises he uses in hot rooms developed by him, a US court ruled on Friday.
In an order by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California, a bench of three judges ruled in favour of city-based Evolation Yoga, against whom Choudhury had filed a lawsuit in 2011. In the lawsuit, Choudhury had claimed that Evolation founders, the husband-wife duo of Mark Drost and Zefea Samson had set up a “copy-cat yoga system that offers classes that utilise and infringe” on his copyrighted sequence of yoga postures.
The appeals court ruled that the sequence of yoga poses and breathing exercises developed by Choudhury was not entitled to copyright protection because “it was an idea, process, or system designed to improve health, rather than an expression of an idea.” “Because the sequence of yoga postures was an unprotectable idea, it was also ineligible for copyright protection as a compilation or choreographic work,” it said. Choudhury founded the Bikram Yoga form of exercise, which is among the most renowned forms of the art, with participants performing yoga postures in rooms heated to 40.6 degrees Celsius.