Bikram Choudhury is the most famous Yogi in the United States. According to his website, Choudhury’s “hot yoga” system will “systematically work every part of the body, to give all the internal organs, all the veins, all the ligaments, and all the muscles everything they need to maintain optimum health and maximum function.”
He must be right; Bikram created an American yoga empire, with followers around the country starting studios practicing his brand of the ancient Eastern art. Bikram’s system is unique, and he has capitalized on his method by suing other yogis for stealing his intellectual property.
In doing so, Bikram has taken an art form based on modesty and simplicity and capitalized on it by calling for the respect of his intellectual property rights. But, can someone copyright a series of yoga positions and breathing exercises?
Copyright laws are intended to prevent the theft of intellectual property and to compensate those who own it. Thus, it is illegal to take someone else’s work and brand it as your own.
In a sense, copyright laws are absolutely warranted and important in verifying that everyone gets his or her share. But, advances in technology have made it extremely difficult to police copyright laws and ensure license holders are compensated.
You can create a mash-up of five rap songs using GarageBand and sell it to friends, you can find billions of photographs online that can be effortlessly copied and pasted, and there are a trillion bits of information online that are just waiting to be hijacked.
Current copyright laws would deem all of these things, without proper attribution, illegal.
Mother Jones magazine published a list of outrageous Internet copyright infringement events in its March/April 2006 Issue.
From the 65-year-old woman who didn’t have downloading software but was accused of sharing 2,000 songs, including “I’m a Thug” by Trick Daddy, to a band getting sued over having a silent 60-second song by the estate of John Cage, who composed the completely silent piece “4’33.”
Perhaps even more pathetic is the case where Rosa Parks sued the band Outkast for using her name as a song title.
Parks settled with the group, but only after Outkast agreed to pay for a Rosa Parks tribute CD and TV special.
It’s issues like these that make us question how we deal with intellectual property rights in this country and to what extent an individual or company can own anything.
Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard University, founded a nonprofit corporation in 2001 called Creative Commons in order to refine copyright laws.
The group encourages the sharing of intellectual property by awarding free licenses that allow for modified restrictions, depending on the preferences of the license owner.
Thus, creators of music, artwork, books and other mediums can decide in what ways they want their works to be shared and distributed. Companies like Google, Flickr, Al Jazeera television, Wikipedia and others have used Creative Commons licenses to designate how their resources can be used and distributed by the public; Lessig himself has four of his books available for free download on his website.
Lessig and his followers believe that tailored licenses, like the ones available for free at Creative Commons, will allow for a heightened sharing of creative ideas, and result in more creative achievement.
Additionally, creating less restrictive licenses will de-emphasize the capitalist culture that encourages all-around pettiness.
But, licenses are created at the discretion of the license holder. In creating a creative work, it is up to each individual artist to decide how his or her product is distributed.
We should compensate artists for their creativity, but we should not be willing to let someone have the rights to anything. Yoga positions that have been used for thousands of years? Give me a break.
Defend your yogi at benjamin.negley@asu.edu
