(Dis)owning Bikram: Decolonizing vernacular and dewesternizing restructuring in the yoga wars

ABSTRACT

Undertaking analysis in the area of critical yoga studies, this article identifies two strategies of anticolonial resistance to Bikram Choudhury's copyrighting of a sequence of twenty-six yoga poses. First, it examines decolonial vernacular, which contests Western commodification of yoga through the use and misuse of terms and phrases, such as “yoga piracy” and “cultural patents,” derived from intellectual property rights, international human rights, and cultural property regimes. Second, it considers dewesternizing restructuring emerging from the creation of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, a database of information on yogic practice and medicine, which uses non-Western classification systems to interrupt the legal and economic structures through which patents and copyrights are enunciated. Together, these anticolonial strategies force intellectual property rights regimes to integrate Otherness, making space for the recognition of Indian agency in knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Yoga
• rhetoric
• intellectual property
• vernacular
• decoloniality
• dewesternization

Acknowledgements

This article, more than any other I have written to date, has taken a village. Thank you to Pamela Pietrucci, Deidre Keller, Jessica Silbey, Genevieve Clutario, Kurt Zemlicka, Mark Lemley, Vincent Pham, Amit Basole, Phaedra Pezzullo, Mary Gray, Ralina Joseph, LeiLani Nishime, Leah Ceccarelli, and Zahr Said for their generous encouragement, engagement, and feedback on this essay. Thank you too to Rob DeChaine, Kent Ono, and the thoughtful reviewers for this journal.

Notes

1. William Patry, “Bikram and Supplementary Registration,” The Patry Copyright Blog, August 29, 2005, http://williampatry.blogspot.co.uk/2005/08/bikram-and-supplementary-registration.html

2. Open Source Yoga Unity v. Choudhury, 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10440, at *1 (N.D. Cal. 2005) (hereinafter OSYU).

3. Bikram Choudhury, Bikram's Beginning Yoga Class (New York: Tarcher, 1979).

4. Bikram's Beginning Yoga Class, Copyright Registration No. 5-624-003, October 2, 2002.

5. “Face Value: The Litigious Yogi,” The Economist, June 17, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/2765973

6. First Amended Complaint, Choudhury v. Schreiber-Morrison (C.D. Cal. 2002).

7. The court also ordered Schreiber-Morrison to pay licensing fees and apologize to Choudhury.

8. Jacob Reinbolt, “Bikram Obtains Copyright Registration for His Asana Sequence,” Bikram Yoga, July 30, 2003, http://www.bikramyoga.com/press/press19.htm

9. The World Intellectual Property Organization defines TK as “knowledge, know-how, skills and practices that are developed, sustained and passed on from generation to generation within a community, often forming part of its cultural or spiritual identity.” World Intellectual Property Organization, “TK,” http://www.wipo.int/tk/en/

10. Kounteya Sinha, “Yoga Piracy: India Shows Who's the Guru,” The Times of India, February 22, 2009, http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-02-22/india/28017121_1_patent-offices-yoga-postures-patanjali

11. Ibid.

12. Jacob Goldstein, “Yoga Wars! India Blocks Patents On Poses,” NPR: Planet Money, August 23, 2010, http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/08/23/129381241/india-yoga-patents-html

13. The Patent Act states: “[a] person shall be entitled to a patent unless—(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.” 35 U.S.C. §102 (2013).

14. Shayana Kadidal, “Subject-Matter Imperialism? Biodiversity, Foreign Prior Art and the Neem Patent Controversy,” IDEA: The Journal of Law and Technology 37, no. 2 (1997): 371–404.

15. 35 U.S.C. § 102 (2012).

16. K. P. Prabhakaran Nair, “Safeguarding India's Ancient Wisdom,” The Hindu, December 9, 2012, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/safeguarding-indias-ancient-wisdom/article4179011.ece

17. See Prashant Reddy, “TKDL: A Success—Really?” Spicy IP, April 20, 2012, http://spicyip.com/2012/04/guest-post-tkdl-success-really.html

18. Allison Fish, “Authorizing Yoga: The Pragmatics of Cultural Stewardship in the Digital Era,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 8, no. 4 (January 1, 2014): 457.

19. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 93.

20. Though I came to the term critical yoga studies independently, I am not the first to use it. See Jennifer Musial, “Yoga & Social Justice,” Jennifer Musial, PhD, 2014, http://jennifermusial.com/yoga-social-justice/ and Judith Mintz, “Welcome to YogaCultures,” YogaCultures, 2014, https://yogacultures.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/welcome-to-yogacultures/. Both Musial and Mintz highlight yoga in practice, paying particular attention to access issues, and cultural appropriation of yogic knowledge in articulating critical yoga studies.

21. See for example Mary Grace Antony, “On the Spot: Seeking Acceptance and Expressing Resistance through the Bindi,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 3, no. 4 (2010): 346–68.

22. Raka Shome, Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (March 2009): 43.

26. The concept of decolonial vernacular, as I use it here, draws upon similar themes as Sonia Katyal's “semiotic disobedience,” which she defines as the recoding of corporatized space through the remaking of symbols in the tradition of the Situationist International's detournement and Lawrence Lessig's remix. Sonia Katyal, “Semiotic Disobedience,” Washington University Law Review 84, no. 3 (2006): 489–571. However, while Katyal draws on European anticapitalist literature, I am interested in anticolonial tactics which center non-Western philosophies, knowledge production models, and theories of resistance. Keith Aoki foreshadows the need for highlighting Otherness in the context of global intellectual property regimes. “Neocolonialism, Anticommons Property, and Biopiracy in the (Not-So-Brave) New World Order of International Intellectual Property Protection,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 6, no. 1 (1998): 11–58. Zahr Said offers a discussion of how postcolonial theory can aid in the rewriting of copyright law's fair use test to acknowledge creative rewritings Otherwise. Zahr Said Stauffer, “Po-mo Karaoke or Postcolonial Pastiche? What Fair Use Analysis Could Draw From Literary Criticism,” 31 Colum. J.L. & Arts 43 (2007).

27. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), xxvii.

28. Christopher Mattison, “Delinking, Decoloniality & Dewesternization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part II),” Critical Legal Thinking, May 2, 2012, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/05/02/delinking-decoloniality-dewesternization-interview-with-walter-mignolo-part-ii/

29. Marouf Hasian Jr. and Fernando Delgado, “The Trials and Tribulations of Racialized Critical Rhetorical Theory: Understanding the Rhetorical Ambiguities of Proposition 187,” Communication Theory 8, no. 3 (1998): 248.

30. Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 25.

31. Mattison, “Delinking, Decoloniality & Dewesternization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part II).”

32. Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 7–8 (2009): 161.

33. Mattison, “Delinking, Decoloniality & Dewesternization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part II).”

34. Ibid.

35. Mark Singleton and Jean Byrne, “Introduction,” in Yoga in the Modern World: Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–14.

36. Shome, Diana and Beyond, 185.

37. Allison Fish, “The Commodification and Exchange of Knowledge in the Case of Transnational Commercial Yoga,” International Journal of Cultural Property 13 (2007): 190.

38. Mark Singleton, “The Roots of Yoga: Ancient + Modern,” Yoga Journal, February 4, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/who-owns-the-patent-on-nutmeg

39. Andrea R. Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 23, 55.

40. Ibid., 39.

41. Choudhury, Bikram's Beginning Yoga Class.

42. Rebecca Moss, “The Hot Yoga War,” Village Voice, July 18, 2012, http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-07-18/news/the-hot-yoga-war/

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman, “Why Is It Easier to Copyright an Unhealthy Yoga Routine than a Healthy One?,” Freakonomics, December 8, 2011, http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/12/08/why-is-it-easier-to-copyright-an-unhealthy-yoga-routine-than-a-healthy-one/

46. “Admission Fees,” Bikram Yoga, 2012, http://www.bikramyoga.com/TeacherTraining/Admissionfees.php

47. “Mantra,” Yoga to the People, 2011, http://yogatothepeople.com/about-us/mantra/

48. OSYU, 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10440, at *6–7.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. “Thin” copyright means individuals may not copy phonebooks exactly but are permitted to use the same set of uncopyrightable factual information they contain in a different format and/or layout. Ibid at *13. Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991).

52. For a critique of “raw materials” metaphors, see Andrew Gilden, “Raw Materials and the Creative Process,” Georgetown Law Journal (Forthcoming, 2016).

53. OSYU, at *6.

54. Allison Elizabeth Fish, “Laying Claim to Yoga: Intellectual Property, Cultural Rights, and the Digital Archive in India” (University of California, Irvine, 2010). A recent holding by the Delhi High Court provides additional evidence for the cultural presumption against the ownership of yoga. L. Gopika, “No IPR Protection for Modern Yoga Techniques,” Spicy IP, January 29, 2014, http://spicyip.com/2014/01/no-ipr-protection-for-modern-yoga-techniques.html

55. Singleton and Byrne, “Introduction,” 4.

56. Moss, “The Hot Yoga War.” See also “Rape Accusations Against Bikram Choudhury,” Yoga Journal, May 9, 2013, http://blogs.yogajournal.com/yogabuzz/2013/05/rape-accusations-against-birkram-choudury.html; Clancy Martin and Rebecca Greenfield, “The Overheated, Oversexed Cult of Bikram Choudhury,” Details.com, February 2011, http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201102/yoga-guru-bikram-choudhury?currentPage=3

57. “Admission Fees.”

58. Emily Wax, “‘Yoga Wars’ Spoil Spirit of Ancient Practice, Indian Agency Says,” Washington Post, August 23, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/22/AR2010082203071.html

59. Martin and Greenfield, “The Overheated, Oversexed Cult.”

60. Fish, “Laying Claim to Yoga.”

61. Prati Patankar, “Ghosts of Yogas Past and Present,” Jadaliyya, February 26, 2014, http://reviews.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/16632/ghosts-of-yogas-past-and-present

62. Nicola Twilley, “Who Owns the Patent on Nutmeg?” The New Yorker, October 26, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/who-owns-the-patent-on-nutmeg

63. See, e.g., Justin Wm. Moyer, “University Yoga Class Canceled Because of ‘Oppression, Cultural Genocide,’” Washington Post, November 23, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/23/university-yoga-class-canceled-because-of-oppression-cultural-genocide/; #WhitePeopleDoingYoga, 2014 http://whitepeopledoingyoga.tumblr.com/; Jen Caron, “It Happened to Me: There Are No Black People in My Yoga Classes and I'm Suddenly Feeling Uncomfortable With It,” XO Jane, January 28, 2014, http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/it-happened-to-me-there-are-no-black-people-in-my-yoga-classes-and-im-uncomfortable-with-it; Kate Dries, “Lululemon Founder Sorry He Said Your Fat Body Was Fucking Up His Pants,” Jezebel, November 12, 2013, http://jezebel.com/lululemon-founder-sorry-he-said-your-fat-body-was-fucki-1463219018

64. The Race and Yoga Working Group, established in 2011 through the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley and advanced by scholars including Musial, Tria Andrews, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Sabrina Strings, and Jacqueline Shea Murphy, is one early and rapidly developing example of critical yoga studies. Its new e-publication, the Race and Yoga Journal, and annual conference aim to address a range of issues related to yoga, identity, and power. Other representative scholarship includes: Pirkko Markula, “Reading Yoga: Changing Discourses of Postural Yoga on the Yoga Journal Covers,” Communication & Sport 2, no. 2 (2014): 143–71; Fish, “Authorizing Yoga”; Jean-Paul Gaudilliere, “An Indian Path to Biocapital? The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, Drug Patents, and the Reformulation Regime of Contemporary Ayurveda,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 8, no. 4 (2014): 391–415; Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

65. Suketa Mehta, “A Big Stretch,” New York Times, May 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/opinion/07mehta.html?_r=1

66. Rosemary Coombe, “Critical Cultural Legal Studies,” Yale Journal of Law & Humanities 10 (1998): 473. My emphasis.

67. This list of critical intellectual property scholars is representative but certainly not exhaustive. Questions of diversity in IPR are developing rapidly, see, e.g., Irene Calboli and Srividhya Ragavan, eds., Diversity in Intellectual Property: Identities, Interests and Intersections (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

68. James Boyd White, “Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life,” The University of Chicago Law Review 52, no. 3 (1985): 684–702.

69. See Rosemary Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) and Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism” for a discussion of processes of rhetorical exclusion in IPR regimes and nuclear policy, respectively.

70. Darrel Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee's Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 652.

71. Mignolo, The Darker Side, xxvi.

72. Madhavi Sunder, From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 3.

73. Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric,” 653. Boatema Boateng in her work on Ghanian textiles and Laura Foster in her research on translation of legal regimes across borders consider the types of questions that Sunder gestures towards. Boatema Boateng, The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here: Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Laura Foster, “Critical Cultural Translation: A Socio-Legal Framework for Regulatory Orders,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 21, no. 1 (2014).

74. Fish, “The Commodification and Exchange,” 193.

75. Hasian Jr. and Delgado, “The Trials and Tribulations,” 248.

76. Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette M. Calafell, “Tracing the Emergence of Latin@ Vernaculars in Studies of Latin@ Communication,” in Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz? (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 23; see also Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Race, Coloniality, and Geo-Body Politics: ‘The Garden’ as Latin@ Vernacular Discourse,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 3 (2011): 363–71.

77. Hasian Jr. and Delgado, “The Trials and Tribulations,” 252.

78. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought,” 178.

79. Sinha, “Yoga Piracy: India Shows Who's the Guru.”

80. Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1997). Leah Ceccarelli also explores narratives of biopiracy and bioprospecting. See Leah Ceccarelli, On the Frontier of Science: An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013).

81. Jane Anderson, “Anxieties of Authorship in the Colonial Archive,” in Media Authorship, ed. Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner (New York: Routledge, 2013), 230.

82. Ibid., 232.

83. Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 6.

84. James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

85. Lawrence Liang, “Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethinking Access to Culture,” SSRN Working Papers, 2009, 10.

86. Martin Fredriksson, “Copyright Culture and Pirate Politics,” Cultural Studies 28 (2014): 1–26.

87. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994).

88. Liang, “Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure,” 13.

89. Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi's Media Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2009).

90. Patrick Burkart, Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests, The Information Society Series (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014).

91. Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. 543, 573 (1823).

92. Debora J. Halbert, Resisting Intellectual Property (New York: Routledge, 2006), 136–37.

93. Johan Galtung, “Scientific Colonialism,” Transition no. 30 (1967): 10.

94. See Rosemary J. Coombe, “The Expanding Purview of Cultural Properties and Their Politics,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 5, no. 1 (2009): 393–412.

95. Aseem Shukla, “On Faith Panelists Blog: The Theft of Yoga,” Washington Post, April 18, 2010, http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/aseem_shukla/2010/04/nearly_twenty_million_people_in.html

96. Ibid.

97. Deepak Chopra, “Who Owns Yoga?,” Huffington Post, December 1, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/who-owns-yoga_b_790078.html

98. Paul Vitello, “Hindu Group Stirs Debate in Fight for Soul of Yoga,” New York Times, November 27, 2010, Comment 156, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/nyregion/28yoga.html?pagewanted=all

99. Ibid.

100. Shukla, “On Faith Panelists Blog.”

101. Nona Walia, “Kissa Copyright Ka,” The Times of India, July 9, 2004, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi-times/Kissa-copyright-ka/articleshow/771448.cms?

102. Ibid.

103. See, e.g., Rosemary J. Coombe, “Intellectual Property, Human Rights & Sovereignty: New Dilemmas in International Law Posed by the Recognition of Indigenous Knowledge and the Conservation of Biodiversity,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 6, no. 1 (1998): 59–115.

104. Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage art. 2, Oct. 17, 2003, 2368 U.N.T.S. 1. For an in-depth discussion of intangible cultural heritage, see Michelle L. Stefano, Peter Davis and Gerard Corsane, Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012).

105. Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts art. 16, June 8, 1977, 1125 U.N.T.S. 3.

106. Because sequences of yoga asanas are not “inventions” under the terms of the US Patent Act (or likely any patent act), they do not qualify as patentable subject matter. Shamnad Basheer, “Stretching IP: Yoga, Suketu Metha's Op-Ed and Prof Sampat's Response,” Spicy IP, May 21, 2007, http://spicyip.com/2007/05/stretching-ip-yoga-suketu-mehtas-op-ed.html; Krishna Ravi Srinivas, “Intellectual Property Rights and Traditional Knowledge: The Case of Yoga,” Economic & Political Weekly, 47 (27), July 14, 2007, 2866-2871. Attempts to circumvent the unpatentability of asanas have been unsuccessful. Vera Ranieri, “October's Very Bad, No Good, Totally Stupid Patent of the Month: Filming A Yoga Class,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, October 30, 2014, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/octobers-very-bad-no-good-totally-stupid-patent-month-filming-yoga-class. Nonetheless, some goods used for yoga are patentable.

107. Marouf Hasian, Jr., Michelle Condit, and John Lucaites, “The Rhetorical Boundaries of ‘The Law’: A Consideration of the Rhetorical Culture of Legal Practice and the Case of the ‘Separate but Equal’ Doctrine,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 323–42.

108. Lawrence Liang, “Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation,” in Sarai Reader 5, ed. Lawrence Liang et al. (Delhi: The Sarai Programme, 2005), 15.

109. For commentary on the erasure of creators of “poor people's knowledge” and economies of local knowledge see Madhavi Sunder, “The Invention of Traditional Knowledge,” Cultural Environmentalism 70, no. 1 (2007): 97–124; Amit Basole, “Whose Knowledge Counts? Reinterpreting Gandhi for the Information Age,” International Journal of Hindu Studies, November 18, 2014.

110. Kimberly Christen, “Gone Digital: Aboriginal Remix and the Cultural Commons,” International Journal of Cultural Property 12, no. 3 (2005): 333.

111. Mehta, “A Big Stretch.”

112. Twilley, “Who Owns the Patent on Nutmeg?”

113. Susanne Hiller, “Hottest Yoga in Town: At 100 Degrees You Feel the ‘Bikram Glow.’ It's Not Pretty,” National Post, March 12, 2003, AL2.

114. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought.”

115. See, e.g., Ikechi Mgbeoji, Global Biopiracy: Patents, Plants and Indigenous Knowledge (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006).

116. Mignolo, The Darker Side, 45.

117. For a history of the IPC see World Intellectual Property Organization, The First Twenty-Five Years of the International Patent Classification, 1971–1996 (Geneva: WIPO, 1996).

118. P. N. Thomas, “Traditional Knowledge and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library: Digital Quandaries and Other Concerns,” International Communication Gazette 72, no. 8 (2010): 659–73.

119. “TK Resource Classification,” 2013, http://www.tkdl.res.in/tkdl/langdefault/common/TKRC.asp?GL=Eng

120. Nair, “Safeguarding India's Ancient Wisdom.”

121. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 131.

122. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out.

123. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11-12.

124. European Patent Office, “India's TK Digital Library: A Powerful Tool for Patent Examiners,” September 6, 2010.

125. “Registration of Claims to Copyright,” Federal Register 77, no. 121 (June 22, 2012): 37605–8.

126. Ibid.

127. Ibid.

128. Greg Gumucio, “YTTP Open Letter to Students Re: Bikram,” Yoga to the People, December 3, 2012, http://yogatothepeople.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Greg-Letter-Bikram-Settlement.pdf. However, YTTP nonetheless stopped using the Bikram Yoga sequence.

129. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd Ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 114.

130. The Copyright Office makes clear that it views yoga as an exercise and “a compilation of exercises would not be copyrightable subject matter.” “Registration of Claims to Copyright.”

131. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 3.

132. For consideration of some of these questions, see, e.g., Sita Reddy, “Making Heritage Legible: Who Owns Traditional Medical Knowledge?,” International Journal of Cultural Property 13, no. 2 (May 2006); Chidi Oguamanam, “Documentation and Digitization of Traditional Knowledge and Intangible Cultural Knowledge: Challenges and Prospects,” in Intangible Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Property: Communities, Cultural Diversity and Sustainable Development, ed. Toshiyuki Kono (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2009), 357–83; Amit Basole, ed., Lokavidya Perspectives: A Philosophy of Political Imagination for the Knowledge Age (New Delhi: Aakar Books, 2015).

133. Bikram Yoga College of India LP v. Evolation Yoga, LLC, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 177671 1 (C.D. Cal. 2012), at *2–3.

134. Ibid., at *1, *9–14.

135. Christopher Alan Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 89; Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 152.

136. David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol Appadurai Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 259.

137. Bikram's College of Yoga, L.P. v. Evolation Yoga, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 17615 (Ninth Cir. 2015), at *27.

138. Ibid., at *19.

139. Ibid., at *16.