Yoga Teacher Training Student Manuals & Copyright: What You Need to Know

First: full disclosure. I’m not a lawyer and the following cannot be construed as legal advice. The following article is based upon my experience creating yoga teacher training student manuals as a content creator. For legal advice, you need to consult a real lawyer, especially as laws may vary in different places.

You may know this situation: you’re creating a yoga teacher training and you need to develop a YTT student manual. Where do you start? And how do you get materials? Is it ethical (or legal) to write down what you know when it’s very similar to the teacher training manual that you learned from? Can you include articles and graphics? What is legal?

Let’s start with your text.

Text & Writing

Copyright law in the US and Canada is pretty straight forward: if you create it, then you have the copyright.

Let’s look at a real world example.

When I created my first for 200 hour yoga teacher training for YYoga as their Director of Teacher Training, I was naturally inspired by the material that I had learned in my own yoga teacher training as a student at YogaWorks. While it would be a breach of copyright to copy anything from the YogaWorks student manual, YogaWorks could not fault me for writing down what I knew in my own head (and what they had taught me in my yoga teacher training).

In a similar situation, when I wrote the student manual for YYoga, I was an employee. Therefore, YYoga owned the copyright for that manual – after all, they paid me to create it! When I left that job and wanted to create my own student manual, it would have been a breach of copyright to use any of the YYoga material – even though I had written it. However, creating a new manual from scratch from the information in my own head would be okay.

To avoid copyright infringement, we have to start with a “blank page.”

This means that you need to put away all other student manuals, and only write – originally – from what you know from your own head. Yes, it may be tempting to refer to the student manual that you learned from as a guide, but RESIST! You will create a much more powerful and personal offering when you create truly from your own mind and resist referencing outside influences.

Articles

Let’s say that Yoga Journal has created the perfect article for your manual. Can you use it?

Well, the short answer is no.

But (yay!) you can link to it.

These days, it is relatively easy to create a QR code. When you scan a QR code with your phone, it will take you to that link online. Using a QR code is a great way to “include” references to relevant and useful online resources in your manual without overstepping your bounds. You could also reference the article the old fashioned way and write out the reference in APA formatting that includes the hyperlink. However, keep in mind that some articles may be located behind a paywall. For example, if you link to an article in Yoga International, students may be required to purchase a membership in order to view it.

Graphics

As for your graphics, sadly, you cannot just copy and paste these from a Google image search. You have a few choices:

• Pay an illustrator to create you your own graphics.
• Use your own photos. Keep in mind you will have to have permission from people in the photo to use the photo.
• Receive permission from the owner of the image and receive written permission (may require compensation).
• Use a royalty free site, like Unsplash or Pixabay to source images, where you permitted to use them without attribution.
• Use public domain images or images from sources like Wikipedia, and attribute them appropriately (on wikipedia and wikimedia, there are many images that you can use, but you are required to “attribute” the author).

Best Practices

A couple final thoughts for best practices.

• When creating, start from scratch. Always start with the “blank page” protocol and create solely from your own mind.
• Be original. When you are creating your own YTT, build “beyond” your own YTT experience. By the time I created my own YTT, I had taken 2 500-hour trainings, and additional 200 hour YTT and countless continuing education workshops and trainings. From this vantage, I created something new that combined many different facets of what I had learned. Though I was certainly standing on the shoulders of my teachers, I also was able to hopefully synthesize something different in the world.
• Obsess about your training; not your student manual. A student manual should actually be the LAST thing that you create if you are developing a YTT program. (If you’re not sure why, read this.) The student manual needs to support the training experience that you are creating; it is not a substitute for that real world experience. Focus on the training experience first, and let the student manual follow.
• Delegate and get support. If you are short on time, then consider getting some support for your creations. Check out my course, “How to Create Your Student Manual,” or my pre-built student manual and see if that can save you some time and effort.

Happy Creating!