© in Yoga?

I was researching Bikram yoga, because there is a class offered by CUYS on Saturday mornings that I'm considering going to at some point. (Sidenote, amusingly, CUYS's website says this:

This class will be conducted "in the style of" a Bikram class, although the heating may not quite reach the prescribed 40.5°C favoured by Bikram, due to architectural constraints.

complete with the unnecessary quotation marks. I was highly suspicious prior to reading the website that they'd be able to successfully get a Cambridge room to the appropriate temperature, and that just confirmed my suspicions.)

Anyways, my research revealed that Mr. Bikram is quite a controversial guy. He believes in "competitive yoga," as well as completely commercialized yoga, raising some people's hackles (although that train has already left the station). But what really is interesting is how aggressively he's attempting to assert his claimed intellectual property rights in Bikram yoga.

The first thing that he seems to have done is trademarked the use of his name in relation to this style of hot yoga. So unless you are licensed by him, you're not supposed to go around calling your hot yoga class "Bikram" (sorry, CUYS). This doesn't seem to be a major problem, I don't think (although I've already forgotten what we talked about in relation to TMing names during one of my IP classes in the fall). But the bigger problem is that he has also attempted to assert copyright in the series of poses ("asanas") that make up a Bikram yoga class. So if you run a class called "hot yoga" and use those asanas in that order, he's going to say you're infringing.

Now, as far as I can tell, he has settled out of court with a few studios, and never actually brought his copyright claim to trial (although this is only based on a couple Google links -- tell me if you know otherwise). But I think that this is still a problem (chilling effects and all that).

I'm not sure if he's trying to assert copyright in the poses individually or in the series of poses together. One website I saw did indicate the first, but that seems ridiculous -- you can't copyright a pose, even if it is part of protectable choreography -- it would be like copyrighting a word out of a book. Silly. So I'm assuming that he's attempting to assert copyright only in the series of poses, meaning that if you used the same poses in a different order, you probably wouldn't be infringing.

So I figure that he's probably trying to claim that the series of poses are a choreographed composition and therefore copyrightable. But I can see some pretty clear distinctions between a choreographed dance and a sequence of asanas. The dance is ultimately a performance, the yoga practice is not (well, I may put on a performance doing yoga, but that's different). Plus, if you start to protect what is essentially a sports training exercise as intellectual property, you are starting to go down a pretty slippery slope -- can I become a basketball coach, come up with a training regimen for my team, and prevent other teams from using it through the use of copyright? (Hmm, maybe I could try to protect it as a trade secret, though ... that could be interesting.) Anyways, using copyright to protect yoga messes up all the incentives. Of course, it depends on exactly what theory you think it is that copyright is based on, but even the ones that might suggest protecting yoga do so tenuously at best.

We actually talked about the possibility of patenting sports moves in my patent class last year (I'm surprised Bikram hasn't gone down that avenue, too), which again we ultimately decided was a bad idea, because none of the justifications for patent law really applied to the development of sports moves (we specifically discussed this in the context of the Fosbury Flop, and whether Dick Fosbury could/should have patented that move).

Ultimately, though, I think Bikram has a TM claim, but nothing more, and is just being silly. But how interesting!