Why Is It Easier to Copyright an Unhealthy Yoga Routine than a Healthy One?
You might wonder first how yoga, dating back thousands of years in India, can be copyrighted at all. (Not easily, as we will explain in a moment.) But the question we raise emerges from a very current dispute between two rival yoga studios.
Bikram Choudhury is the founder of Bikram Yoga, a popular chain of yoga studios frequented by celebrities such as Lady Gaga and David Beckham. In Bikram Yoga classes, students enter a room heated to 105 degrees Fahrenheit to perform a set of 26 traditional poses and two breathing exercises. While you might think demand for this would be low, “hot yoga” has made Choudhury very rich. He has a villa in Beverly Hills, and a collection of more than three dozen Rolls-Royces and Bentleys.