Publication Date
8-2-2022
Abstract
Public debate on yoga as property fixates on whether yoga should be owned, asking if yoga can be Indian property. Framed as such, the public discourse obscures a century-long, ravenous arc of yoga ownership in the United States, accumulated by whiteness, beginning in the early twentieth century. What do the stories of yoga in American law tell us and hide about property and intellectual property? In this critical intellectual property (IP) study, I present the first map of U.S. yoga copyrights grounded in quantitative data. The map reflects that yoga has been exponentially “propertized” by U.S. copyright law. My evidentiary data set includes over 7,500 yoga copyright titles culled from archival research in the United States Copyright Records Room, Library of Congress (pre-1978), and the Copyright Public Records Portal. I find a 14,000% rise in yoga copyrights from 1937 to 2015. Total growth overall in American copyright titles during the same time period hovers just under 300%—a disparity that highlights how extreme the rise in yoga as property has been for a century. The propertization of yoga under copyright law continues at a soaring rate. This Article is intended to raise questions about the implications of the story of yoga as American property. What stories does a map of legal ownership and exclusion in American yoga tell us vis-à-vis ongoing debates in property law and IP at the intersection of traditional knowledge, indigeneity, and race? One such story reveals a throughline of tensions around belonging. Yoga, as a form of age-old traditional knowledge chronicled in the Global South, is categorized under IP law as orphaned in the public domain—a terra nullius cultural property without inhabitants, history, or ties that bind. Yoga is deemed freely available to extract and domesticate into profitable private property. Ironically, in this story, yoga was readily domesticated into American property for decades while Indians were legally banned from stepping foot into U.S. territory and barred from the right to obtain citizenship. Ultimately, this Article is not bent toward doctrinal reform but instead engages a Critical Yoga Theory approach, using “yoga as property” as a lens through which to notice racial tensions harbored in dominant narratives of property. Critical Yoga Theory frameworks such as “yoga as property,” work to unearth, notice, and mend contradictions in the stories we tell and do not tell, about IP law.
First Page
725
Recommended Citation
Roopa Bala Singh, Yoga as Property: A Century of United States Yoga Copyrights, 1937-2021, 99 DENV. L. REV. 725 (2022).