Modern Biopiracy Cases
TKDL documentation of yoga postures
2010CSIR-TKDLTraditional Knowledge Digital LibraryPan-Indian / unspecified
2010
Documented about 1,500 yoga postures as prior art to block patents and copyrights on them.
- Dated
- 2010
- As scholars put it
- 2010
- Originator
- CSIR-TKDL
- Source text
- Traditional Knowledge Digital Library
- Region
- Pan-Indian / unspecified
- Discipline
- Modern Biopiracy Cases
- Evidence
- Documented
- Confidence
- Medium
- Verification
- Reference-cited
Background
In the 2000s copyrights were registered in the US on yoga sequences, notably Bikram Choudhury's hot-yoga series, and patents and trademarks on yoga-related products multiplied. The TKDL team documented postures from classical texts and added them to the library in 2010 as prior art.
Significance
In 2012 the US Copyright Office stated that yoga sequences cannot be registered as compilations of exercises, and in 2015 a US federal appeals court ruled that Bikram's sequence was not protected by copyright.
Meanwhile in the West
Hundreds of US yoga-related patents and copyrights had been filed.
Fair to say
Numbers vary across reports.
Path to modern innovation
Protects yoga as public-domain knowledge.
Builds on
1,000 BCEGlobal impact
- Yoga postures remain in the public domain internationally.
Transmission
Shared with patent offices.
References
- 1CSIR-TKDL
Further reading
Corrections and additional sources: edit IND-370 on GitHub.