Bikram Choudhury — the multimillionaire founder of Bikram Yoga, a 90-minute sequence of 26 traditional poses performed in a heated room — has long maintained the inviolability of his technique, so much so that he has sued unaffiliated yoga studios for supposedly poaching his program.
His claims of copyright infringement — backed by a powerful legal team — scared off alleged offenders more often than not. But that wasn’t the case with Mark Drost and Zefea Samson, the Santa Barbara–based husband-and-wife owners of Evolation Yoga, which has a Summerland studio in the Big Yellow House building.
“He sued us in 2011, and we made a commitment to not back down at any point,” Drost said. On October 8, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Choudhury, solidifying a lower court’s ruling from December 2012. “That [first ruling] was exciting,” Drost said of his studios’ efforts to fend off Choudhury’s claims of copyright violation. “But to have this decision from the appeals court is really big news for the yoga community around the world.