New York: A US appeals court has ruled against Indian-American yoga guru Bikram Choudhary's claims to copyright protection over yoga poses and breathing exercises he uses in hot rooms developed by him. A bench of three judges in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California ruled in favour of Evolution Yoga, against whom the lawsuit had been filed in 2011.
Choudhary, in the lawsuit, had claimed that Evolution founders, Mark Drost and Zefea Samson had set up a “copy-cat yoga system that offers classes that utilise and infringe” on his copyrighted sequence of yoga poses. The court said that the sequence of yoga poses and breathing exercises developed by Choudhary was not entitled to copyright protection because “it was an idea, process, or system designed to improve health, rather than an expression of an idea.”
“Because the Sequence (of yoga postures) was an unprotectable idea, it was also ineligible for copyright protection as a compilation or choreography.”
