(FORTUNE Magazine) – Yogi Bikram Choudhury, 57, is going to the mat for his empire.

Over three decades the celebrity yoga master has built a following of 700 "affiliates"--yoga studios owned and run by graduates of Choudhury's $5,000 training program. His devotees adhere to a strict routine of 26 yoga poses performed in a room heated to 105 degrees.

But angry that unlicensed instructors were capitalizing on the Bikram craze, Choudhury turned up the heat last spring by copyrighting his routine. He and his attorney, Jacob Reinbolt, are vowing to sue infringers for $150,000, the maximum penalty for willful copyright violation. The first suit against a California studio is pending. But some yogis, like Jonathan Fields, a former lawyer who owns Sonic Yoga in New York, think suing small studios and copyrighting postures that are thousands of years old isn't exactly in the spirit of the pursuit.

Meanwhile, Choudhury is in the final stages of designing a franchise agreement that would give him control over details, from instructor dialogue down to studio flooring, as well as require affiliates to pay him a monthly share of profits. Let's hope that's the only way in which this yogi isn't flexible. --Carrie Levine