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Posted by Steven Wu on Thursday, February 05 @ 20:23:52 EST
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In what surely pushes the boundaries of what is copyright- and trademark-able, a new suit in federal court asks the question: Can a yoga sequence be copyrighted or trademarked? (Link from How Appealing.)
Bikram Choudhury, the Beverly Hills yoga master . . . . copyrighted, trademarked and franchised his poses, breathing techniques and dialogue . . . .
Now, a San Francisco nonprofit organization of yoga enthusiasts from San Rafael to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., is countering with a federal lawsuit attacking the guru's claim that yoga is proprietary. They say that yoga is a 5,000-year- old tradition that cannot be owned. . . .
. . . Choudhury 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.
"Do-re-mi is in the public domain until you make a melody and turn it into a song and copyright it,'' Choudhury said. "The English language is public domain but if you write a book, on any subject, you get a copyright." That's a nice analogy at the end, although pushed to either extreme it isn't tenable. While a sequence of notes can certainly be copyrighted even though each individual note is "public domain," I don't think that a publisher who arranges a volume of public domain short stories can prevent others from issuing volumes containing the exact same sequence of stories. (But I could be wrong.)
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Re: Yoga Copyright (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, February 05 @ 22:01:29 EST | "...public domain short stories can prevent others from issuing volumes containing the exact same sequence of stories. (But I could be wrong.)"
you are very wrong. The arrangment of a compilation is copyrightable, even if all components of the compliation are PD. Also courts have ruled stupid things like the pagenumbers and formating are unique original IP and protected.
You can't copyright a process what it sounds like a sequence of yoga positions is. But, of course it will take alot of money wasted on lawyers to find out. |
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Yoga as a Process (Score: 1) by JimCYL on Wednesday, February 11 @ 14:09:53 EST (User Info | Send a Message) http://journals.aol.com/jimcyl/geeklaw/ | One of the comments suggests that the sequence of poses is a process, and that processes can't be copyrighted. I'd be more inclined to suggest that the "property" at issue here is a type of performance that would be protected under the same theory as dance instructions.
Given the description of the copyrighted interest, and the specificity of the program, I think that, while Choudhury might have a copyright in the overall product, any protection he would get would be pretty thin and limited to a direct duplication of his entire program. |
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