YOGA!!!

Friday night I was telling someone that Bikram from Bikram Yoga is my cousin and I was talking about how theres some rich ass dude named Bikram walking around getting guap anytime someone does some yoga shit that's been around forever.....

From Telegraph (UK) yesterday:

India moves to patent yoga poses in bid to protect traditional knowledge

Beware: the spine-twisting yoga pose you strike in your gym or village hall is not just a struggle between your mind and body – it's also the subject of a global battle for patents pending.
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi Last Updated: 1:57AM GMT 23 Feb 2009

India has set up a team of Hindu gurus and 200 scientists to identify all ancient yoga positions or asanas and register each one to stop "patent pirates" from stealing its "traditional knowledge".

So far, they have added 600 asanas to India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library to stop so-called gurus in the United States and Europe patenting established poses as their own.
India has been angered at attempts by mostly American yoga teachers to patent moves from their classes as their own originals.

Since its arrival in Britain and America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it was popularised by Beatles guitarist George Harrison, among others, Yoga has become a $225 billion industry.

In India, however, it remains collective knowledge – practiced in public parks where gurus often teach fast breathing exercises, like pranayam, and different 'sun-salutations,' free of charge.

But as the number of Western yoga teachers has grown, there has been a steady increase in patent applications claiming each pose in their class is not part of the ancient discipline of mind and body, but their own unique invention. In the United States alone, there have been more than 130 yoga-related patents, 150 copyrights and 2,300 trademarks. Now India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is being made available to patents offices throughout the world so they can establish whether the claim is a genuine innovation or "prior art" from Indian systems of medicine.

So far a team of yoga gurus from nine schools have worked with government officials and 200 scientists from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) to scan 35 ancient texts including the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Bhagwad Gita, and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras to register each native pose.

The attempt by US teachers to patent traditional poses has caused disbelief and anger in India, where it has been practiced for around 6,000 years.

"Copyrights over yoga postures and trademarks on yoga tools have become rampant in the West. Till now, we have traced 130 yoga-related patents in the US. We hope to finish putting on record at least 1500 yoga postures by the end of 2009," said Dr V.P Gupta, of the CSIR, who created the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library.