SAN FRANCISCO –For years, Bikram Choudhury, the Beverly Hills yoga magnate and self-styled “Yogi to the stars,” has threatened competing studios with legal action.
He claimed that he alone had the right to determine who could teach his sequence — 26 poses that include Rabbit, Camel, Locust and Dead Body — that he popularized in a book more than three decades ago.
A federal appeals court disagreed, ruling Thursday that Choudhury’s method was not protected by copyright law and that competitors could not be held liable for teaching it.
“Consumers would have little reason to buy Choudhury’s book if Choudhury held a monopoly on the practice of the very activity he sought to popularize,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
