YogaGlo Update

1. Junk patents abound in today's digital world, where "method" and "computer" have been endlessly linked to suggest that something is innovative when it is not. YogaGlo's patent is a bit different but in the same spirit of method madness.

2. For much of this, we can thank the loosening standards imposed over the past two decades by a specialized patent appeals court that has given overblown significance to what once was a highly specialized field of tremendous importance to the competitors immediately involved but not to average people. Result: average people see the flood of junk limiting, irritating, and frustrating their lives and are mad as can be at the skewed results.

3. In a parallel world known as that of the law, it is business as usual, with the junk patents having become monetizing weapons in the hands of aggressors and with the industry generally profiting at every angle from the "growth business" that patent litigation has become. Most of the actors see the insanity but also see nothing at all that is poised to dislodge it because the many tentacles that combine to choke off common sense are so diffused and dispersed, with each having its own reason for failing to act: congressional leaders beholden to lobbying interests, market-leading device-makers seeking to keep competitive advantage by any means possible, those who seek to challenge them having of necessity to spend billions to buy their own arsenal by which to protect themselves, federal circuit judges who have a built-in incentive to magnify the importance of patents and of their role in shaping the "inventions" of the future, a federal system of checks and balances in which a Supreme Court must defer to constitutional restraints on its power to reform the mess it sees before it, a patent office that is overwhelmed with junk applications and simultaneously pressured to move them along in the system without being too finicky about which ones pass or not, and a startup community that is basically schizophrenic on the point in philosophically condemning the system while, in the case of any given venture, embracing it insofar as it gives to the venture a potential sustainable competitive advantage.

4. Seen in this context, the YogaGlo defense is actually as good a technical defense of a junk patent as one might make: it pleads that people try to understand that, as a business matter, the company needs to stake out its turf and block others from intruding on it through the same sort of legal means that all other ventures use and, thus, what should be so wrong in its doing what the whole world is doing anyway; it argues that the thing really is as narrow as one might imagine given that all sorts of non-patentable ways do and always have existed for filming yoga classes; and it claims that the company is really just reasonable and restrained and hardly intending to create the sort of dust-up that followed in the wake of people's shocked realization that they (or people they like) might get sued for doing what used to be a routine filming of an instructional video. Imagine if you were given the awful task of trying to defend this thing. How would you have done it better? From the company's standpoint, this is the baser half of the startup world's schizophrenic attitude toward patents: we may oppose the hell out of it philosophically but, when it comes to pragmatic advantage, stand aside and let us do what we must do to meet our business goals.

5. Of course, in the end, this is really just one more junk patent and so the company's defense comes off as inadequate and even insincere. Yes, others may have made some unfair statements that distorted the facts but the company's problem is that such statements, though perhaps unfair in a narrow sense, perfectly capture the sense that most people have that this grotesque thing should not be allowed to stand and that no tears of sympathy need be wasted on those who brought it into existence, whatever their motives.

I discounted every single word they said after seeing the pictures! I cannot believe any sane person, much less a patent official, can believe that those ought to be patentable.

What came to mind was a Sanskrit proverb many Indians would be aware of: "Vinaash Kale, Vipreet Buddhi", which roughly translates to, "When the hour of destruction is near, the brain abandons all logic."

I hope (against hope) the end of the patent system as we know it is nigh :)

-- Aisle down the center, speaker at the front ("a line of sight corridor between the rear area of a class and the instructor in the front of the class")

-- Camera at the rear in the middle of the aisle, providing clearest, centered view of the speaker ("an image capturing device located in the rear area with an unobstructed view of the instructor, to provide a participatory view through the line of sight corridor")

-- Everyone seated facing the speaker (duh) ("students in a class, facing the instructor, distributed across the classroom between the instructor position and the image capturing device wherein the students do not block the corridor.")

So they just took a standard filming technique and added 'yoga' to it.

Is anyone looking through old DVD or VHS videos of Yoga lessons, or through Youtube (or similar) video sites?

This strikes me as another reason why DMCA is bad. Backing up an old VHS tape might require breaking the macrovision copy protection. Yet it's important to keep this old stuff around because it might be useful in cases like this.

[1] http://yogainternational.com/article/view/patents-and-lawsui...

Also... frankly, this is awesome. We need increased lunacy outside of the software industry for people to understand how broken patents are. This story is getting enough traction that "Patent Reform" is likely to be an idea that will resonate with substantially more people.

I've been meeting with investors recently and one of the most common questions/comments has been - "Why can't someone else just do the same thing? Can a group of Stanford grads build this in a weekend?" This line of questioning is relevant to pretty much all startups today.

The reality is, from what I can tell, to build YogaGlo, you could build this in a month with a fairly decent tech team and a little bit of hustle. Now imagine you're the CEO of YogaGlo today and an investor asks you these questions. Easy answer - "they can't, we have a patent". Think of this in another light. What happens if the company goes bust and there are no physical assets to liquidate? A patent (or IP) is an asset that can be sold. (think Nortel[1])

We've significantly lowered the barrier to pretty much every industry in the world. The production cost of one of these yoga classes can't be more than $100 per video and yet can reach a million in a click of a button. Since it's so "easy", we come full circle back to how important ownership, rights, IP and patents are. Otherwise your business is simply another replaceable middle man.

However here is where I believe YogaGlo has just screwed up in playing this game. Because it's so easy to reproduce their IP, companies like YogaGlo should be focusing on mindshare, and less about patentability and competition. Create such good relationships with yoga instructors and the people watching the videos that they wouldn't dare go to the competition. This sentence stuck out more than anything: "Several companies offered to buy us, invest, license our technology, or hire YogaGlo to film their classes. When we declined, a few grew unhappy with us." You declined?! Are you out of your mind? Why not become the de facto company for licensing your technology, filming other Yoga classes, etc? That's how you build mindshare - and mindshare is IMHO the "new IP".

[1]-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel

I've followed online yoga sites for years and this is by far the most common and obvious way of filming a class.

Or people really just don't care, which is entirely possible, but I won't let my faith sink that low just yet. If you'd patent a camera angle then you'd probably have no problem creating accounts to bolster your ego.

Exactly when Yoga started is a matter of debate but most will grant it a couple of thousand years at least and most much farther back.

As an example is [Forrest Yoga](http://www.forrestyoga.com/) where prior art is technically in illustratiosn and text in ancient books. (There are diligent engineers in India working to scan every single page of these books as so people can claim it as prior art.

In Forrest yoga though they have made slight different in some of the poses to justify it.

More importantly its the morality of feeling like as a teacher with maybe 40 years or less experience that you have mastered Yoga enough to own it.

So, now in the US there is a lot of money in Yoga, and Americans at every level are trying to create patents to protect their "business" Be it in Yoga itself, in the teaching of Yoga, in the franchises, and apparently the filming of Yoga.

I feel we need a rule that will punish an organization or person filing or a patent that is objectively illegitimate. I suppose the punishment would have to be based on a percentage of the gross earnings of the company.

"Yoga International could keep the videos on its website until it had a chance to re-film the classes using a different style."

So they say they're not using the patent as a weapon, but then describe themselves harassing another organization with it. Their patience is generous only if we can assume it's no trouble at all to re-film those classes (ugh).

And doesn't the existence of videos they "felt were very close to ours" imply a bit of prior art and/or lack of originality on the so-called patented style? Or perhaps are they are insinuating that Yoga International willfully "stole" or "reverse engineered" their style before the patent was issued?

Namaste...

Lets vote to get rid of the patent system.