Uproar Over a Yoga Patent

Yoga people get very mad when a company tries to protect its intellectual property.

In any rapidly expanding industry, there is bound to be conflict about who owns what. In the exploding arena of personal communications devices, for example, Apple and Samsung continue to fight an expensive legal battle over who owns the rights to certain design and technology.

In late September, YogaInternational.com posted a piece on their website explaining that they had received a Cease and Desist Letter asking that they stop hosting yoga instruction video that had a certain look, which was produced with certain technical processes and tools. The letter came from YogaGlo. Each company provides online streaming videotaped yoga instruction to students who pay a monthly subscription.

Richard Karpel, the President and CEO of Yoga Alliance, which represents the largest registry of yoga teachers and yoga schools around the world, responded with a request to sign a petition urging YogaGlo to back down.

YogaGlo then posted a reply of their own, defending their patent application, in which they seek protection from unauthorized use of their method of providing online yoga instruction. In the application’s abstract, YogaGlo CEO and Co-founder, Derik Mills, listed as the inventor, states that his “system and method allow the viewer participant to view and take part in an instructional class from any location and at any time without compromising the viewer’s ability to experience a participatory class experience.”

In the setup that Mills seeks to patent, the students and teacher are arranged as most churches are, with yoga mats replacing the pews, and a yoga teacher on a mat where the altar would be. The camera is located where the door to the church would be, pointed at the teacher with the students in view on either side of the aisle.

Since yoga’s popularity exploded in the early 2000s, countless failed attempts have been made to stream yoga classes in a way that feels like the real live deal. If YogaGlo has indeed cracked the code for making online classes more like live classes, as their application states, then they’ve done something big. And if they’re the first to do it, then perhaps they should be awarded a patent that protects it.

One of the fundamental pillars of yoga is that each individual practice is unique, therefore instruction works best when constantly adjusted to the students present based on what a teacher sees. To be able to make the necessary non-stop adjustments, a teacher must move around the students and see them from different angles. In YogaGlo’s patent application, the instructor stays planted on the mat at the front of the room. While that setup isn’t what’s best for the students in the room, it does seem to work well for YogaGlo’s many subscribers. In the past few years, as I have traveled around the world teaching, more and more students tell me that they learned something important from a video on YogaGlo. That is important and supersedes any opinion I have about best practices for yoga teaching methodology.

The issue of patentability, and the overwhelmingly negative public response to the patent and the Cease and Desist Letter, has given rise to inquiry into a couple of important points regarding where we are right now with the business of yoga.

A fundamental question that any successful business needs to answer is, “What are we selling?” The public perception of the patent application is that YogaGlo’s business model is based on selling the way they set up the room and the camera, and the technology that gets the videos to the public. And while it may very well be that Derik Mills sees those things as YogaGlo’s most valuable asset, he would be wrong.

Any business that presents yoga instruction is only as valuable as the instruction itself. If the teachers on YogaGlo’s site didn’t provide good teaching, it wouldn’t matter what technology was involved. It would fail. And, while YogaGlo presents plenty of young teachers still finding their voices, it also hosts some highly skilled living legends of yoga teaching, like Seane Corn and Richard Freeman. It is tragic that, in so public a way, YogaGlo’s perceived brand identity has suddenly shifted from providers of instruction to defenders of property. But, ultimately the choices about YogaGlo’s brand stewardship are up to Mr. Mills and his partners. Only they know what they seek to sell.

Another volatile point in the issue is the question of whether yoga and business should ever mix at all. Many of the public comments on the sites of all the involved parties state that yoga and commerce do not belong together at all. Ever.

Separating any sellable thing from commerce is ultimately impossible. Most yoga teachers are small businesses, whether or not they are registered as such. Teachers make choices about what to charge, how to market, and how and what they provide, whether they work independently or for a company. And this is not something that just started with yoga’s introduction to the West. Along with ethical marketing, hucksterism and snake-oil salesmanship are just as refined and prevalent in India as they are in the US, and they have been for as long as yoga has been taught.

Part of being a human being is that we have to make choices about our behaviors. The Bhagavad Gita, India’s version of a bible, discusses a fundamental human question: How do we live in this material world while seeking spiritual truth? In the Gita, Arjuna, a professional soldier, is paralyzed with fear at the choice presented to him at the outset of a battle. He loves people on both sides and can’t participate without killing some of them. He discusses the problem with Krishna, the Christ figure of Hinduism. Krishna’s response starts with the firm assertion that the soldier has no choice but to fight. Then follows a conversation about how to participate.

The epic battle is a metaphor for the conflicts that come up in humans who are trying to do the right thing. Those of us who observe an inherent divinity in all beings struggle with choices about how to navigate this world of things without disturbing our path to the non-thing of which we’ve somehow been made aware. While it would be easy and convenient to simply excuse ourselves piously from commerce itself, it is a fool’s errand. In other words, as a human being, you don’t get to escape business. All humans consume.

Even if you take the life of a monk and give up all possessions and sit in meditation for the rest of your life, somebody has to feed you. And if you’ve learned how to live on air alone, you are taking somebody else’s air. The trick to being human is to learn how to blossom, like a lotus, in this muddy world of what is yours and what is mine. As the mythologist Joseph Campbell said in his book, The Power of Myth, “One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.” We are all doing our best to make the right choices.

My business started, like most yoga businesses, with my love of yoga and of teaching. From that passion and from knowing my own strengths, I built a business concept. That business has trained many great yoga teachers who are sharing their knowledge and making a positive impact in the quality of life all over the world. And often, because I do it well, there is profit. There is nothing unethical about that. And, for all we know, Derik Mills started YogaGlo with the very same kind of motivation. None of us can know what the right ethical or business choices are for Derik Mills. And those who tell him he is un-yogic don’t know the meaning of the word. Being un-yogic isn’t possible. It would mean disconnecting from the unified universe, which humans can’t do while alive. Watch your language, haters.

If you disagree with YogaGlo’s actions, the most powerful response that you can make is to cancel your YogaGlo subscription. And if you don’t think it’s wrong, then don’t. If you don’t have a subscription and you’re not a teacher on their site, you really don’t have a say. That’s how business works.