The standard “Bikram yoga” or “hot yoga” session is a series of 26 yoga poses and two breathing exercises performed in a sauna-like room (95-100 degrees F, 40% humidity) over a 90 minute period. The heated studio is claimed to facilitate deeper stretching, prevent injuries, relieve stress and tension, and “detoxify” the body.
Bikram Choudury claims to have originated the method over 30 years ago, and he brought Bikram yoga to Los Angeles in 1973, holding to the tradition of free yoga guidance held in his native India.
Along the way he claims Shirley Maclaine, one of his students, took him aside and told him he needed to charge for his yoga because it is the American way. He claims she set him up with a business manager and that started things rolling.
Bikram yoga is now a phenomenon, with branches worldwide, and hundreds in the U.S. alone.
The yoga itself benefits many. Its adherents claim it’s made them stronger, fitter, healthier, calmer, and saner. Though there does not seem to have been any organized study of Bikram yoga’s benefits, the popularity and anecdotal evidence indicate it’s followers must be getting some value from it (at $20 per 90 minute session, it’s got to do something for them).
But this very popularity and the cost hint at the serious legal and ethical issues that surround this discipline. Because Bikram yoga is not just a discipline; it is a big and controversial business.
COPYRIGHTED YOGA?
At the heart of the Bikram yoga controversy is that Choudhury(who goes by “Bikram” only, like “Sting” or “Pele”) copyrighted his series of yoga positions. By copyrighting it, he is claiming the sequence of positions (which are all part of the many-thousand-year-old yoga tradition) as his own intellectual property.
In a 2005 lawsuit brought by the Open Source Yoga Unity against Choudhury, the courts decided that there was no precedent to deny Choudhury’s copyright claims, and granted that reproducing his sequence of yoga positions without attribution is a copyright infringement.
With this decision in hand, Choudhury has aggressively pursued legal recourse. He claims to have sued many for “infringements” on his copyright, and has even claimed his copyrights cover things like mirror placements, the music played during sessions, and the temperature and humidity of the studio. A San Francisco lawsuit in 2005 against several studios offering hot yoga sessions ended with an out-of-court settlement where the studios agreed not to
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