‘Downward Dog’ Can’t Be Copyrighted

A self-styled “Yogi to the stars,” lost a legal battle to copyright the series of yoga poses he popularized in a book more than three decades ago. A federal appeals court last week found that Bikram Choudhury’s 26-pose sequence could not be copyrighted, nor could competing yoga studios be held liable for teaching it. The sequence is “an idea, process, or system designed to improve health,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Copyright protects only the expression of this idea – the words and pictures used to describe the sequence – and not the idea of the sequence itself.”