This NPR Piece highlights the issues faced by Indian officials who are working to protect ancient Yoga poses. They are compiling information about Yoga practices that go back for thousands of years to be included in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. This information will be sent to patent offices around the world in order to insure that these practices cannot be legally patented.
"Yoga is collective knowledge and is available for use by everybody no matter what the interpretation," the head of the digital library told the WaPo. "...we wanted to ensure that, in the future, nobody will be able to claim that he has created a yoga posture which was actually already created in 2500 B.C. in India."
This is an example of ways to insure that traditional ideas and practices can be protected from commodification in a globalized economic system which would attempt to assign a monetary value to nearly everything.
Dominique Brown
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