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If you’ve ever dreamed of trademarking your own yoga style or patenting a yoga invention, you may want to work faster.
The Indian government has set up a task force to try to prevent the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from granting more yoga-related copyrights to American companies. To date, there are 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. The Indian government is in the process creating a database of hundreds of asanas and ayurvedic remedies. This, they claim, will let patent offices around the world know that yoga and ayurveda originated in India.
Yoga has become an $3 billion industry in America (some sources report $8 billion), which begs the question: Has the U.S. commercialization of yoga gone too far? And does India have to right to claim yoga as its own? Does anybody?