Legislators, lawyers, judges, and even individuals are busy these days, thinking of fun new ways to surprise and amuse us with copyrights.

Bikram Choudhury, 57, had his own special idea - copyrighting Yoga positions. How does he hope to protect his intellectual property? "I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each." Evidently Mr. Choudury is the current One True Inheritor of the some 5,000 year-old tradition of yoga, and this realization came to him once he had lived in the US for some time; before that, he did not charge for his services. Read the rest of the story here.

Another trend is to encourage more participation by dead people in our society. The popularity of dead voters is increasing in places outside the US nowadays, and anyway with the US voting machine and supreme court election resolution systems, dead voters just aren't needed like they were in the good old days. So some new activities are being developed for dead folks there to make them still feel included. Remembering that copyrights and patents have been implemented to encourage creativity and innovation, legislators have been busy extending the copyright duration beyond the writer's lifespan. By doing this is is hoped that some creative people may be encouraged to come back and continue their work after they have died. Here's a chart which will show you how this works - as an author, you now have the right once you die to come back for 70 years and keep on collecting those royalties, which of course should provide quite an incentive for a little out-of-grave astral projection.

But we've saved the best for last. Mike Batt, a British composer, put a one-minute segment of silence on one of his albums. Those familiar with avant-garde US music might remember that John Cage, who died in 1992, composed a piece in 1952 called 4' 33". In this piece, which was composed for piano, the musician seats himself on the piano bench, places a timepiece on the piano, and waits in silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds before taking a bow and leaving the stage. Mike Batt was successfully sued for infringement of the silence, according to this article, which reports a six-figure pound sterling settlement.

If you have any amusing copyright anecdotes, from the US or any other country in Wonderland, please post them!