India acts to unravel yoga patents
Print5,000 years of prior art
Posted in Law, 9th May 2007 14:35 GMT
Free whitepaper – Managing operating systems and applications with the new Dell Management Console
The Indian government has set up a task force to create a database of yoga techniques in order to stop others from patenting the poses.
The US Patent Office has granted 150 yoga-related copyrights and 2,315 yoga trademarks.
The Indian government is getting old Sanskrit and Tamil texts translated and is also cataloguing ayurvedic medicines. The information will be made available in five languages so patent offices around the world can access it, according to the International Herald Tribune.
Yoga has been practised for thousands of years in India but the government is increasingly concerned that people are trying to turn a buck from part of their cultural inheritance.
US-based yoga instructor Bikram Choudhury insists that "his" sequence of 26 poses can only be taught by graduates of his training school who have paid him a fee.
Two years ago the Indian government worked to end the manufacture of generic versions of patented drugs under threat of action by the World Trade Organisation if they did not comply.
More here. ®
Free whitepaper – Total cost of ownership of Dell, HP and IBM blade solutions
The Register Agile Data Center Summit
What Exchange can't do - and Dell can
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide
Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter