If you follow Michael Crichton, you know about the scandal of gene patents. Now, it seems, there is a problem with yoga patents, too:

I grew up watching my father stand on his head every morning. He was doing sirsasana, a yoga pose that accounts for his youthful looks well into his 60s. Now he might have to pay a royalty to an American patent holder if he teaches the secrets of his good health to others. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. There’s big money in those pretzel twists and contortions--$3 billion a year in America alone.

It's a mystery to most Indians that anybody can make that much money from the teaching of a knowledge that is not supposed to be bought or sold like sausages. Should an Indian, in retaliation, patent the Heimlich maneuver, so that he can collect every time a waiter saves a customer from choking on a fishbone?

The Indian government is not laughing. It has set up a task force that is cataloging traditional knowledge, including ayurvedic remedies and hundreds of yoga poses, to protect them from being pirated and copyrighted by foreign hucksters. The data will be translated from ancient Sanskrit and Tamil texts, stored digitally and available in five international languages, so that patent offices in other countries can see that yoga didn’t originate in a San Francisco commune.

It is worth noting that the people in the forefront of the patenting of traditional Indian wisdom are Indians, mostly overseas. We know a business opportunity when we see one and have exported generations of gurus skilled in peddling enlightenment for a buck. The two scientists in Mississippi who patented the medicinal use of turmeric, a traditional Indian spice, are Indians. So is the strapping Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram Yoga, who has copyrighted his method of teaching yoga--a sequence of 26 poses in an overheated room--and whose lawyers sent out threatening notices to small yoga studios that he claimed violated his copyright.

But as an Indian, he ought to know that the very idea of patenting knowledge is a gross violation of the tradition of yoga. In Sanskrit, "yoga" means "union." Indians believe in a universal mind--brahman--of which we are all a part, and which ponders eternally. Everyone has access to this knowledge. There is a line in the Hindu scriptures: "Let good knowledge come to us from all sides." There is no follow-up that adds, "And let us pay royalties for it."

One analogy offered to explain the logic here is that of music. No one owns the notes. But if you compile notes into a unique melody, you can own that. The analogy in turn raises Lawrence Lessig-like questions about our creative commons. Should yoga routines and poses be freely shared? Or should the yoga industry--which surpasses $3 billion each year in the U.S. alone--go the way of the music industry? Perhaps what we need is a way of using the internet to share poses.

Whatever the ethics behind it all, I can vouch for the effectiveness of Bikram's yoga style. It's gentle but very deep, building strength, endurance, and flexibility at the same time. It's also very good for calming the mind. His book is excellent--but, unlike so many other star yoga instructors, he has not issued a DVD. That might have something to do with his intellectual property concerns. But whatever the reason, it's a loss.