India: You Can't Patent Yoga

Leave it to Americans to make a fast buck off cultural heritage: India is livid over efforts by yoga teachers, mostly Americans, to patent poses developed over 6,000 years of practice. India has set up a team of Hindu gurus and 200 scientists to catalog ancient yoga positions and register them in India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Database to help stop "patent pirates" from passing off "traditional knowledge" as their own original work. So far, there are 600 poses on the list derived from 35 ancient texts including Hindu epics, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. India hopes to have 1500 on record by the end of 2009.