India to protect yoga from 'pirates'

NEW DEHLI, India -- The Indian government says gurus and fitness instructors in Europe and the United States are stealing yoga practices that are thousands of years old.
    
    Officials say the foreign practitioners have claimed hundreds of patents and copyrights on poses and techniques lifted straight from classical Indian yoga treatises, the London Sunday Telegraph reported.

    
    "We know of at least 150 asanas (yoga positions) that have been pirated in the U.S., the UK, Germany and Japan," said Vinod Gupta, the head of a new Indian government task force on traditional knowledge and intellectual-property theft.
    
    The task force has begun documenting 1,500 yoga postures drawn from classical yoga texts -- including the writings of the Indian sage, Patanjali, the first man to codify the art of yoga.
    
    The data is being stored in a digital library whose computerized contents will soon be made available to patent offices worldwide.
    
    Officials say the worst "culprits" are Indians based in America, where yoga has become a $30 billion-a-year business.