Facebook's Terms of Service do not allow people to post content that violates someone else's intellectual property rights, including copyright and trademark. We publish information about the intellectual property reports we receive in our bi-annual transparency report.
Facebook's Terms of Service do not allow people to post content that violates someone else's intellectual property rights, including copyright and trademark.
Bikram Choudhury made a series of claims that his yoga practice, Bikram Yoga, was under copyright and that it could not be taught or presented by anyone whom he had not authorized, starting in 2002.
In 2011 Choudhury started a lawsuit against Yoga to the People, a competing yoga studio founded by a former student of Bikram's and with a location near one of the Bikram Yoga studios in New York.
As a result of that lawsuit, the United States Copyright Office issued a clarification that yoga postures (asanas) could not be copyrighted in the way claimed by Bikram, and that Yoga to the People and others could continue to freely teach these exercises.
In 2015, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling that the Bikram Yoga Sequence was not copyrightable subject matter.
