You probably know that the World Intellectual Property Organization is the place where the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) works. The Committee is devoted to establishing legal norms against misappropriation and misuse of traditional knowledge and folklore, and the intellectual property (IP) aspects of access to and benefit-sharing in genetic resources. Personally I’ve got a number of questions and reservations about this initiative. It is not the time and place to write about that in here, though. For those of you who got interested, there are some interesting articles at wipo.int website.

The whole idea of writing a post on this issue came into my mind after I’ve read the article at iht.com. Copyright protection for yoga excercises? Patents?! Well, on the other hand, in the U.S. copyright law there is the judgement in the case Open Source Yoga Unity v. Choudhury, 74 U.S.P.Q.2D (BNA) 1434. Let me quote a short excerpt.

The court readily acknowledges that this is a very unusual case. All the parties agree that yoga is an ancient physical practice, and that the individual asanas that comprise the Bikram yoga sequence have been in the public domain for centuries. On first impression, it thus seems inappropriate, and almost unbelievable, that a sequence of yoga positions could be any one person’s intellectual property.

However, what is at issue are two competing principles of copyright law. On the one hand, copyright law does not protect factual or functional information, or information that is already in the public domain. On the other hand, copyright law does extend protection to an arrangement of information in the public domain assembled in a sufficiently creative fashion. The question at hand is how to reconcile these two principles.

The judge didn’t explicitly state whether yoga excercises can be copyrighted. He didn’t rule out the possibility to give copyright protection to yoga excercises as well, though. If you would like to learn more, I invite you to read professor Pamela Samuelson’s draft article entitled “Why Copyright Law Excludes Systems and Processes From the Scope of Its Protection“, PDF file, forthcoming in 85 Texas Law Review, (2007).

Categories: US law | copyright law | patent law | trademark law.