If you’ve read anything about Bikram yoga in the past year, it probably hasn’t been good. Newspapers everywhere have been devoting column inches to its founder Bikram Choudhury’s current crusade to sue all those he believes to be using his name in vain – setting up schools he hasn’t approved and taking liberties with the 26 poses in the specific sequence that he has copyrighted. He famously told Business 2.0 magazine: “I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons. Nobody fucks with me.” Not a typically yogic attitude, you might think.
But what is Bikram yoga?
The sequence of 26 poses, comprised mostly of balancing and back-strengthening exercises with no upper body poses, is performed twice in a room heated to around 100 degrees. The idea behind the hot room is to allow muscles to remain relaxed and also to rid the body of toxins and help you to get deeper into the poses.
Bikram invented this sequence when his career in weight-lifting was cut short by an accident that crushed both his knees when he was only 20. He had been studying yoga since the age of four and, after the injury, he returned to his guru, Bishnu Ghosh, and, under his guidance, created the series of 26 postures that returned him to full health. His system is the result of three years of work with scientists at the Tokyo University Hospital and combines Eastern philosophy with Western medical knowledge of the body. It works on the concept that you cannot know the spiritual until you can control the physical. This may explain why his classes seem to be part yoga and part aerobics, with the teacher calling instructions at you from the front of the room rather than guiding you through the postures.
In recent years Bikram has overtaken ashtanga as the yoga to be doing. Everyone from Alexander McQueen to the late George Harrison and even Michael Jackson are supposedly enjoying getting sweaty in the name of yoga. But has Bikram’s success gone to his head? In January last year, Bikram paid out $500,000 for a lawyer to trademark his sequence of postures and the word-for-word dialogue explaining how to do them. His style of yoga is now copyrighted and Bikram has been sending letter to studios across the States fining those who he believes are infringing this copyright. Every infringement will cost the perpetrator $150,000. They include not going by the name Bikram’s Yoga College of India, teaching with music or taking liberties with the order of the poses and failure to pay the fines will result in a lawsuit. Bikram told Business 2.0 that “people were doing illegal things. I had to stop them.”
It does seem that more and more studio owners across the States will be left with no option but to beg if Bikram plans to see these “cease and desist” orders through to the courts.
Though, interestingly, lawyers are now saying that, although Bikram may have obtained copyright, that doesn’t mean his claims of infringement will stand up in a court of law. As his sequence was passed on to him by his guru, Bishnu Gosh, it could be said that this information was in the public domain rather than the intellectual property of Bikram himself. According to copyright lawyer Ken Swezey, of New York firm Cowan, DeBeats, Abrahams & Sheppard, “copyright doesn’t mean that Choudhury’s assertions will hold up in court. Copyright law protects ‘expression’, not ideas or processes. A court would have to be convinced that a sequence of the exercises is original, protectable ‘expression’ rather than merely a collection of factual material.”
