Remember when Bikram tried to copyright his yoga sequence of 26 poses? It didn’t work. It didn’t end there and it’s not that simple. But there is good news. The latest update to the saga is that today, October 8th, 2015, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California sided with the previous ruling that Bikram [...]
yoga to the people
Bikram copyright lawsuits are the gift that keep on giving. As we learned last week, the year-round Santa of Sweat, Bikram Choudhury, was more or less triumphant over defender and former Bikram consort Greg Gumucio who, according to the settlement, will no longer offer a somewhat copycat class of 26 poses in a heated room at his Yoga To The People studios come February 2013. Faced with being sued by Bikram threatened to be “incredibly expensive as well as mentally and emotionally exhaustive,” but Gumucio fought on mainly on the principle that a sequence can’t be copyrighted (which the U.S. Copyright Office actually confirmed themselves in June). But don’t call Gumucio a hero. Don’t call him a victim or a martyr. Just call him a smart guy getting the hell out of bedlam.
Joy to the world, the latest Bikram million dollar lawsuit is over. Or is that ding dong, the yoga copyright witch is dead? Well, not quite. But at least the most recent ugly brawl between Bikram Choudhury and former student turned successful yogapreneur himself, Greg Gumucio, with bi-coastal studio chain Yoga To The People has been settled.
The two were at odds over Bikram’s “copyrighted” sequence of 26 poses, which Gumucio’s studios generously borrowed along with the heated temps and for a much cheaper price at the growingly popular YTTP. So, naturally, Bikram launched a million dollar lawsuit against Gumucio in November 2011 claiming copyright infringement, which as we learned, is kind of bogus. More on that later.
In the Case of Bikram vs Yoga to the People, Copyrighting Yoga, Who Wins?
Bikram is pissed. And when Bikram is pissy, you can bet he’s suey! The beef between B-Don and Yoga to the People went public a few months ago with the closure of a Penn Station Bikram Yoga location and the subsequent slinging of blame in the direction of YTTP in public letter form. The story’s [...]
BEEF! Uh oh. Bikram may have his legal team under lockdown once again. The offender? Yoga to the People, the often mat-to-mat packed and sweaty yoga studio touting “no glorified teachers, scripts or pedestals” with multiple locations around NYC, as well as West Coast. And they wrote it in a letter, to the people. Apparently the beef came [...]
