Hot Bikram Yoga Suit Heats Up East Village 'Yoga to the People'

As if Bikram Yoga wasn't hot enough, now its founder, Bikram Chaudhury has filed suit against Yoga to the People, an inexpensive East Village Yoga studio, for ripping off his copyrighted moves, according to reports at DNAinfo. The source quotes the Lawyer for the famed, and pricey, Yogi, Robert Gilchrist, as saying that the class is a virtual mirror image of Choudhury's. The California Yaoga-celeb even sent a spy in to a class to find get the skinny before dropping the legal paper on the East Coast rival in Californai Sept. 27.

It's not the first time Chaudhury has sued, and he won last time, back in 2003, against Prana Yoga. The press relaese from Bikram Yoga, showed that it was, in fact, a violation to used copyrighted terms such as Bikram, its symbols, Chaudhury's likeness and the like. That makes perfect sense. On the other hand, it would appear that if you teach a yoga class, using the postures, which are thousands of years old and freely available to anyone, even if you turn up the temperature, you might be fine.

Yoga to the People founder Gregory Gumucio, vowed to fight the case, according the the hyperlocal news site. I suppose All the People people need to do, although I'm no lawyer, is stopped calling what they do Bikram and just call it...Yoga.