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Yogis bent out of shape over posing patents
A downward dog yoga pose
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TEXT OF STORY
Steve Chiotakis: The health industry is a big market, and now yoga is a growing slice of it. Classes, mats, books and other spin-off items, have made yoga a $6 billion a year industry. So it's perhaps not surprising that there's a rush to patent yoga poses at U.S. patent offices. That's got some people in India bent out of shape. Raymond Thibodeaux reports from New Delhi.
Raymond Thibodeaux: In a leafy Delhi suburb, yoga teacher Mani Chaitanya leads a class in Sivananda Yoga. His students crouch down like sprinters at the start of a race, then fold themselves in an upside-down V. Chaitanya says it's hard to imagine that some yoga positions, better known here as asanas, could be off limits to him and his students because of patent infringements. Or, more likely, they'd have to pay extra to do the patented moves.
Mani Chaitanya: The truth cannot be patented to anybody. Truth can be available to anybody. Gravity cannot be patented. Same thing. Even yoga cannot be patented by somebody.
But when several yoga gurus in the U.S. started franchising their yoga centers, they applied for patents for their signature styles.
V.K. Gupta heads the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. It's part of India's Center for Scientific and Industrial Research, the government agency trying to stop the patenting of traditional yoga moves. He believes that any patent-hungry yoga teacher does not have Yoga's best interests at heart.
V.K. Gupta: He wants to make his own money, for his own benefit, on the knowledge that he has no business to make money on because he did not create it. That knowledge was created 4,000 years back.
Gupta says the problem is that knowledge is written in Sanskrit, an ancient and little-known Indian language. His team has spent two years combing through Sanskrit scriptures to identify at least 900 asanas and catalog them in English and other major languages.
Gupta: Our system is not fighting after the patent has been granted. We provide information to patent system so they do not grant a wrong patent.
That is a patent for a yoga pose that already exists. India has agreements with U.S. patent offices to protect its traditional knowledge from being wrongly copyrighted.
Still, the U.S. has issued about 130 yoga-related patents to date, many of them apparently for innovations to traditional yoga poses. But with more than 84,000 distinct yoga poses described in India's Sanskrit tomes, coming up with something original could be quite a stretch.
In New Delhi, I'm Raymond Thibodeaux for Marketplace.
Thanks to Mr. Joseph Breimayer for a detailed demystifying write up. It is the responsibility of a story maker to understand the technicalities and fundamentals before sending the story for publication. Any ways, because of this story, we could know better about the actual position.
Chris: Your link brings up a design patent D612946 for a Foot Therapy and toe Aligning Device show in the drawings. A design patent only prevents others from copying the exact depicted design of the device and of course selling the device; it cannot be used to prevent practicing a method e.g., using the patented device. Alice/jigar: The USPTO and the European Patent Office have issued denials of the gist of this story, and I cannot find a single issued US patent that could be used in any manner feared by yoga practitioners. bubbleDouble: It is illegal in the US to mark a product that is not patented as "patented" and to fraudulently mark a product as "patent pending" when no application is pending. Look it up on Wikipedia. Again, this is a non-story that resurfaces every few years and just adds to public confusion about patents. NPR was duped and should never have been aired or at least critically reported the facts behind the story.
Yog and Aasans were daily practice for few thousands of years in India by many sages. Maharshi Paatanjali started many of these postures and gave to the world for free. They didn't think that today's world could be that greedy who wants to make money using other people's invention/discoveries. It is outrageously incorrect and inappropriate to put a value or label to any yogic postures or aasanas.
I don't understand why/how the US Patent Office is doing this. As a visual artist, I see so many problems with issues of "ownership" concerning rights to make money. Yoga, like many human activities, is not the property of any one person or corporation.
Joseph: Isn't this patent for a method?:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=...
As an experienced patent attorney, I was surprised that NPR would air such a naive and misleading story. There are so many things wrong with this story that it is hard to begin.
First, it seems to confuse patents for inventions and copyrights for creative works. Unfortunately, the public is deplorably ignorant about the unique legal rights granted holders of patents, trademarks and copyrights granted by government agencies in the United States. This story simply reinforces that widespread ignorance.
In this country, applicants seeking patents for inventions and copyrights for creative works file applications with the USPTO and the Library of Congress affiliated copyright office, respectively. The USPTO patent examiners examine the applications for patent, and a patent is only granted if its claimed invention is found to be patentable. Similarly, applications to register trademarks are examined by USPTO trademark examiners to determine if they can be registered.
If copyrights have been granted on works depicting the yoga practices of concern, the rights granted would be limited to prohibiting others from copying instructional videos or books used to teach the yoga moves or positions. Copyright cannot be used to prohibit teaching or performing the moves or positions by someone who has learned to do so using the copyrighted materials. And remember that any author of a creative work of his own can obtain a copyright of the work, even if the work itself only describes what is already well known. So, describing known yoga poses and moves may well be copyrightable but of little value.
Next, filing an application for patent, trademark or copyright grants no rights to the applicant. However, nothing would prevent anyone from filing an application and falsely claiming an enforceable right under the application to prevent others from practicing the poses. Advertiser's of dubious health products often claim "patent pending" or "so good it is patented" to fool the public into thinking that the USPTO has rendered a judgment that the product is better than others. But, an invention can only be patented if it is novel and not obvious in light of all knowledge in the world. Whether it works or is superior as advertised is irrelevant to whether a patent will be granted. And even if the application is finally rejected in the USPTO, nothing prevents the advertiser from filing successive applications to be able to continually assert "patent pending".
Third, another U.S. Supreme Court decision issued earlier this month (Bilski) reinforces the decided law that abstract ideas are not inventions and cannot be patented under U.S. law. Yoga moves and positions are not machines, compositions of matter or inventions that can be patented.
If yoga related patents have issued (which I doubt, as many people confuse the published applications as issued patents), the patent claims would have to be limited to some concrete structure, such as exercise equipment used to achieve or maintain the position. Patents like these support the business models of exercise equipment manufacturers and fitness studio franchisers. A yoga studio franchise could be legitimately built on unique trademarks and trade dress (studio layout and style), copyrighted instructional materials, trade secret maintained procedures and training of employees, and designs and utility patents covering exercise equipment.
And, importantly, U.S. patents, trademarks and copyrights are only enforceable within the U.S. and territories. They cannot be enforced in India or any other country. The story fails to explain the reason for concern in India.
It sounded like individuals in India were sending evidence of known yoga practices to the USPTO to create prior art against the feared patent applications. This may be of marginal utility to patent and trademark examiners, unless the applicant has foolishly claimed that he “invented†the yoga practice.
Finally, if you go to the USPTO patent search website, and search “yogaâ€, only 268 patents issued from 1976 are found. See, http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fn...
From their titles, one can see that all of the listed patents just incidentally include the word somewhere in the text or are expressly limited to exercise equipment or apparel that would be of use in performing yoga or other exercises. So, this entire story seems to be much ado about nothing.
As a 50 plus year practising yogini, I truly know that there is magic to yoga, and anyone who goes against the powers in it will "get theirs" there is much similarity to the greek orthodox meditations and yoga meditations and we know the power there try patenting all you want then when someone gets hurt from the pose they know who to sue
