Author: David Orr, The Sunday Telegraph
Publication: www.canada.com
Date: September 20, 2005
URL: http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=1c5484d3-2d68-4afe-bfca-d21e8e652aab
Foreigners claim patents on ancient techniques
It is meant to engender feelings of peace
and well-being, but yoga has become a battleground as India tries to stop
its ancient heritage from being exploited by the West.
The Indian government is furious that yoga
practices dating back thousands of years are being ''stolen'' by gurus and
fitness instructors in Europe and the United States.
Foreign practitioners are already said to
have claimed hundreds of patents and copyrights on poses and techniques lifted
straight from classical Indian yoga treatises.
''Yoga piracy is becoming very common and
we are moving to do something about it,'' says Vinod Gupta, the head of a
recently established Indian government task force on traditional knowledge
and intellectual property theft.
''We know of at least 150 asanas [yoga positions]
that have been pirated in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Japan. These were
developed in India long ago and no one can claim them as their own.''
In an effort to protect India's heritage,
the task force has begun documenting 1,500 yoga postures drawn from classical
yoga texts -- including the writings of the Indian sage Patanjali, the first
man to codify the art of yoga. The data are being stored in a digital library
whose computerized contents will soon be made available to patents offices
worldwide.
The worst culprits are Indians based in the
United States, where yoga has become a US$30-billion-a-year business -- a
growth fuelled by celebrity adherents such as Madonna.
Among Western gurus who have prompted the
concern, according to an Indian official, is Bikram Choudhury, whose ''Bikram''
or ''Vikram'' method is currently one of the most fashionable styles in the
West. A session involves a series of 26 poses in a room heated to 32C to 38C,
enabling pupils to adopt more ''extreme'' positions than at normal temperatures.
A spokesman for Mr. Choudhury refused to discuss the task force report, but
the guru has previously said rather than claiming intellectual ownership of
the individual postures themselves, he has copyrighted a sequence of poses,
the dialogue that accompanies them and the environment in which they are performed
during his classes. These, he claims, are all of his own devising.
The U.S. Patents Office has issued 134 patents
on yoga accessories, 150 yoga-related copyrights and 2,315 yoga trademarks,
says the Indian task force. It also claims Britain has approved at least 10
trademarks relating to yoga training aids that are mentioned in ancient texts.
According to one report, attempts have even
been made in the United States to patent the syllable ''om,'' the sacred sound
with which Hindus begin their chants.
''No one should be able to claim ownership
of these traditional postures,'' Dr. Gupta said. ''The information has been
in the public domain in India for thousands of years. But, until now, it has
only been available in languages which people in the outside world cannot
understand.''
The government move is part of a larger project
to document all sources of traditional Indian knowledge. The database contains
details of thousands of herbal treatments drawn from age-old health systems.
So far, 10 million of an estimated 30 million pages of texts in Sanskrit,
Arabic and Persian have been translated and entered into the digital library.
India was alerted to commercial exploitation
of its national heritage in 1995, when a U.S. company was granted a patent
on the wound-healing properties of turmeric. Two years later, another company
was granted a patent on basmati rice. India successfully challenged both patents.
