The Emergence of Yoga-as-Property in American Law: The Haunting Presence of Commercial Logics from Swami Vivekananda to Bikram's Hot Yoga.

In 2003 the highly profitable transnational commercial yoga community was unsettled when the controversial Los Angeles-based yogi, Bikram Choudhury, launched a barrage of legal actions against fellow hot yoga teachers. At the heart of these disputes were Bikram's copyright and trade mark claims to a popular yoga choreography performed in a heated room. These disputes quickly attracted attention from an array of stakeholders including Indian civil society, governmental figures, spiritual ascetics, and open source advocates who presumed that such proprietary claims were not only novel, but also preposterous and inherently at odds with yogic values. This article seeks to interrogate this presumption and, in doing so, trace a longer history through which transnational yogic flows have always-already been haunted by notions of spiritual and economic exchange. Moreover, while the Bikram disputes may have brought proprietary claims in yoga to public attention, this article will demonstrate two things. Firstly, that intellectual property claims of various kinds have been applied to expressions of the practice in the United States since at least 1895. Secondly, despite more than 15 years of active litigation involving Bikram's claims, certain aspects of the intellectual property issues surrounding his hot yoga practice remain unsettled. In tracing the historical roots of yoga-as-property, the article illustrates how popular understandings and legal logics move in and out of sync with one another and that proprietary claims, once introduced, become virtually inescapable – a spectral presence that continues to trouble the practice as it moves forward into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]