The practice of yoga outside India and for commercial exchange
(transnational commercial yoga) is a multibillion-dollar industry that has
been the site of increasing formal regulation. The primary questions these
regulations are meant to resolve include the following: (1) What is yoga?
(2) What is its proprietary nature? and (3) Who has the right to manage
its expression? Two recent U.S. federal district court cases involving the
Bikram Yoga College of India, a yoga franchise based in Los Angeles, have
drawn international attention to the debate on whether yogic knowledge or
practice resides in the public or private domain. This article asks, if
given the monetary value at stake, did the global market for transnational
commercial yoga set the stage for claims to individual IPRs? Furthermore,
this article analyzes how yoga, due to its unique characteristics as an
embodied practice and intangible form, serves as a platform for
experimentation from which new meanings of open source, IPRs, and
information management strategies emerge.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like to thank the Department of
Anthropology, the School of Social Sciences, and the Center for Asian
Studies at the University of California, Irvine, for their funding
support.