RSSCan anyone "own" yoga?
If you've ever dreamed of trademarking your own yoga style or patenting a yoga invention, you may want to work faster.
The Indian government has set up a task force to try to prevent the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from granting more yoga-related copyrights to American companies. To date, there are 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. The Indian government is in the process creating a database of hundreds of asanas and ayurvedic remedies. This, they claim, will let patent offices around the world know that yoga and ayurveda originated in India.
Yoga has become an $3 billion industry in America (some sources report $8 billion), which begs the question: Has the U.S. commercialization of yoga gone too far? And does India have to right to claim yoga as its own? Does anybody?
Jeanne Ricci is the former managing editor of Yoga Journal and author of Yoga Escapes (Celestial Arts, 2003). She first started practicing yoga in the early 1990s at Integral Yoga in Manhattan. She went on to study Iyengar Yoga with various teachers in the Bay Area after moving there in 1994. She returned to Manhattan in 2000 and resides there with her husband, Don, and daughter Sofia. Currently, her practice revolves around Mommy and Me classes that don't conflict with her daughter's nap schedule.
