Copyright law may seem an odd forum for a battle of yoga instructors, but a recent Ninth Circuit opinion affirming that a sequence of yoga poses is not copyrightable subject matter under 17 U.S.C. § 102(b) sets important guideposts on the contours of copyright protection.

Bikram Choudhury teaches a popular particular sequence of 26 yoga poses practiced in a hot room over 90 minutes known as "Bikram Yoga." By instructing other yoga teachers in his methods and licensing franchises for "Bikram Yoga," Choudhury built a business empire. To combat competition, he widely asserted that because he had developed the particular sequence he taught, he was entitled to copyright protection over it, and that others could not teach the sequence. Choudhury and his company threatened and ultimately sued several of his former protégées who taught the same method, one of whom had founded Evolation Yoga.

Choudhury based his claims on a 1979 book in which he described the 26 poses and two breathing exercises and his recommended order for performing them. In 2002, through a supplementary registration form that referred back to the 1979 book, he registered the "compilation of exercises" the book described.

The Ninth Circuit rejected Choudhury's attempt to use his copyright in the 1979 book, which covered the photographs, drawings, and words, to control others' expression of the idea of the sequence of movements. Bikram Yoga College of India, L.P. v. Evolation Yoga, LLC, 803 F.3d 1032 (9th Cir. 2015). It looked to 17 U.S.C. § 102(b), holding that the sequence of exercises was excluded under the idea-expression dichotomy. The court cited the seminal Supreme Court case of Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99 (1879), for the proposition that ideas, procedures, and processes fall instead within the purview of patent law.

The court also noted that, regardless of whether it was "beautiful," the Bikram Yoga sequence is a process to promote health and well-being. Tellingly, Choudhury himself claimed the sequence "is designed to scientifically warm and stretch muscles, ligaments, and tendons in the order in which they should be stretched."

The Ninth Circuit also rejected Choudhury's argument that the sequence was a compilation and that his "selection, coordination, and arrangement" of the exercises was protectable expression. It emphasized that just because "the Sequence may possess many constituent parts does not transform it into a proper subject of copyright protection. "Virtually any process or system could be dissected in a similar fashion." It also noted that Choudhury's arrangement, based on his own claims, was due to medical and functional considerations. Importantly, it was irrelevant that other yoga pose combinations could produce similar results; that other methods existed did not make an uncopyrightable method copyrightable.

Also unsuccessful was Choudhury's attempt to claim the yoga sequence as a "choreographic work." The Ninth Circuit emphasized that section 102(b)'s limitations apply to all types of copyright subject matter and that simply calling the sequence "dance-like" did not convert it from an uncopyrightable process to a copyrightable choreographic work. It noted that section 102(b)'s limitations appear especially important as applied to choreographic works because "our day-to-day lives consist of many routinized physical movements" and that unchecked claims could intrude on everyday bodily movements.

The Ninth Circuit's approach to section 102(b) in the Bikram opinion stands in stark contrast to the Federal Circuit's approach to the "structure, sequence and organization" of application programming interfaces (APIs) as copyrightable subject matter, especially the Federal Circuit's assertion that "under Ninth Circuit law, an original work—even one that serves a function—is entitled to copyright protection as long as the author had multiple ways to express the underlying idea." Oracle Am., Inc. v. Google, Inc., 750 F.3d 1339 (Fed. Cir. 2014). As it stands, companies dissatisfied with Ninth Circuit law may try adding patent claims to copyright cases with an eye towards forum-shopping to the Federal Circuit for an alternative view.

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