India Patents How to Sit, Stand, and sit "Indian style".

A friend of mine posted that "India patents 1,300 yoga moves" (via en.rian.ru/world). Here's a brief overview:

Hindu gurus and some 200 scientists compiled the list from 16 ancient texts to prevent yoga teachers in the United States and Europe from patenting established poses as their own. ... "We are making available the 30-40 most popular yoga asanas in the open domain," TKDL head, V K Gupta said. "The rest will be available only to patent offices." ... Indians have been outraged by attempts by "yoga gurus" in the West to patent poses. In the United States alone, the patent authorities have issued more than 130 yoga-related patents, 150 copyrights and 2,300 trademarks related to the ancient practice.

Hmm, I would think that unless you can prove a certain pose has not been done before, you shouldn't be able to patent it. How can they patent something hundreds of years old? As for copywriting, are they talking about "yogis" who copywrite books of how to do Yoga? I don't see why this is a legal issue... if I write about, even about a common subject, water, I copywrite my book. I don't own water, I didn't invent it, what I'm copywriting is the intellectual property of the words that came out of my brain and onto the paper. My work.

Yoga (6) as meditation seems to have been introduced around 3rd-4th century BC, when it wasn't India: it was the Maurya Empire(4) and Hinduism was just beginning to take root, and would lead to Buddhism, which also used Yoga as meditation. India (3) begins looking more like India around 10th C. AD, but isn't really the India we know it until 16th-18th century AD.

Yoga as a physical practice, or Hatha yoga (1), wasn't really set down and compiled until 15th C by Yogi Swatmarama, (in India) as "Hatha Yoga Pradipika" (2)(7). It's said to be the oldest surviving text on the subject, but is also said to be a compilation of older texts. It's free to DL online, btw, but seems to be mostly text descriptions and little pictures.

A patent (5) can be issued (bought) for novelty and non-obviousness. They could file yoga under this because even though there's a huge hunk of "yoga" that is really a weird revision of the practice that came out in the 70s, everyone still says "oh, it's an old Indian practice" etc. But patents expire after 20 years, unless renewed, and the thing becomes fair use. Yoga poses that have been around 500 years shouldn't be able to be patented. How can they "patent" something that old?

The article even states they're doing it in response to people patenting their own yoga poses, but they'd be able to do that as long as they changed the pose a little anyway. They're acting like "Patent trolls" to try to exclude other people from using/distributing something older than their grandfathers. It's idiotic!

/rant over.

Bib:
  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatha_yoga
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatha_Yoga_Pradipika
  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INDIA
  4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurya_Empire
  5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
  6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga
  7. Yoga Swami Svatmarama. Hatha yoga pradipika (Link is Download of PDF). [link]
  8. Supercool tree asana image from Colourbox [link] It's NOT my image!

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