Gibson pay tiny fine; get away with despoiling Madagascar

So, the depth of Gibson guitar's venality in importing wood from protected rainforest in India and Madagascar is unquestionable, but Gibson are still maintain they weren't to know. Professor W John Thomas of Quinnipiac University is quoted by the New York Times:

By the terms of the agreement, Gibson concedes that after traveling to Madagascar in 2008, it received a report concluding that “It is currently illegal to harvest or export ebony.” In 2009, on the advice of a Gibson employee who counseled that a German wood supplier named T.N. (Theodore Nagel) could supply the company with ebony obtained from “the grey market,” Gibson arranged for four shipments of Madagascar ebony. Furthermore, “Gibson assumed, without asking, that T.N. had undertaken to provide it with lawfully harvested and exported materials.”

Ah, yes, that old grey ebony. We all know that. Gibson, we're supposed to believe, were like the customers of Burke and Hare, delivered of a large pile of human body parts and never thinking to ask where they came from.

Gibson's now done a deal with the US government, where it pays a tiny fine:

Gibson will pay a $300,000 fine, make a $50,000 contribution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and forfeit wood valued at $261,000 seized in the 2009 government raid on its Nashville facilities.

Yes, the fine barely even matches the value of the wood the company had had ripped from underneath endangered species on its behalf. Pitiful.

Worse, because the US government can't quite decide on the status of the other protected wood Gibson - sorry, this totally different German company what Gibson had no reason to believe was anything other than pure than the driven, guv, honest - had procured, Gibson gets it back. That wood is worth USD155,000. As wood. By the end of turning that little lot into overpriced guitars, Gibson might even be showing a tiny profit. Well done them, eh?

Gibson in the jungle

A couple of years back, Gibson was caught using Rosewood illegally sourced in Madagascar.

The wood was discovered in a 2009 raid by the Environmental Investigation Agency in the US. Because Gibson had previously worked with environmental groups - and because Gibson's chair and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz was on the board of the Rainforest Alliance at the time - the company got cut a surprising amount of slack over the illegal wood:

“I think that the first statement on all of this is that Gibson has shown an awful lot of leadership historically on environmental issues,” said Scott Paul, director of forest campaigns for Greenpeace USA.

Gibson denied knowing that the wood was dodgy:

[O]n the company’s Internet message boards, general counsel Bruce Mitchell said in July that any wood Gibson purchased from Madagascar was legal and that suppliers “provided assurances” as such.

“Gibson affirmatively believes that any wood we have obtained from Madagascar is in fact from legal sourcing,” Mitchell said.

This would seem hugely unlikely, but - hey - Gibson were working with environmental groups, right?

Juszkiewicz took a "leave of absence" from the Rainforest Alliance board, but generally it appeared everything was going to blow over. Be forgotten.

Trouble is, Gibson decided they wanted the seized wood back. A case for forfeiture has been filed by the Department Of Justice which Gibson are resisting.

As part of the DOJ response to Gibson, it appears that some internal Gibson emails have made it into the public domain which, if genuine, prove that not only did Gibson import illegal wood, but it knew the wood was illegal when it imported it:

"[A] Gibson employee…wrote that '[t]he true Ebony species preferred by Gibson Musical Instruments is found only in Madagascar (Diospryos perrieri). This is a slow-growing tree species with very little conservation protection and supplies are considered to be highly threatened in its native environment due to over exploitation.' In fact, [he] 'spent two and a half weeks in Madagascar this June [2008],’ writing on his return, 'I represented our company along with two other guitar manufacturers.... All legal timber and wood exports are prohibited because of wide spread corruption and theft of valuable woods like rosewood and ebony.'

Guitars are brilliant things. But they're not worth despoiling a unique environment for; they're not more brilliant than the lemurs whose habitat is being slowly munched away by illegal logging. If the allegations against Gibson are proven, the company deserves to have the book thrown at it, very hard indeed.

If it was pretending to be ecologically aware while turning a blind eye to where some of its wood was coming from, it deserves to be ostracised.

When your midlife crisis hits, maybe you should consider a Les Paul?

Guitarobit: Les Paul

Les Paul - the man, not the guitar - has died at the age of 94.

Starting out with big bands in the 1940s, it was Bing Crosby who inspired his approach while Django Reinhardt influenced his style.

Although best known for the guitar which bears his name, Paul's real gift to modern music was multitracking - cooked up using a tape machine gifted by Bing. It allowed him to play most of the tracks and his then wife Mary Ford to sing most of the vocals on the hits they had together.

It took Gibson a long time to accept Paul's designs for a solid body guitar, and even when they did take him up it was as a me-too product to compete with Fender.

Although Les Paul went into semi-retirement in the 1960s, he was actually still playing live until recently. Troubled by arthritis, Paul had to develop his style to cope: something he did successfully, as he explained to CNN:

"If you only have two fingers [to work with], you have to think, how will you play that chord? So you think of how to replace that chord with several notes, and it gives the illusion of sounding like a chord."

Les Paul died earlier today from the complications of severe pneumonia.

Who owns Guitar Hero?

Activision's Guitar Hero, a game where you can pretend like you're playing guitar in the same way that a karaoke machine can make you pretend you're actually a singer, has just been hit by a lawsuit from Gibson. Apparently, Gibson filed a patent back in 1999 claiming to have invented a way of playing guitar that wasn't actually playing guitars, but would be enough like the experience to persuade people to hand over large sums of cash:

A copy of Gibson's patent included in the court filing showed a method for simulating a live performance using a musical instrument, a 3D headset with stereo speakers, and a pre-recorded concert.

"Based on our preliminary analysis, the 'Guitar Hero' software (including any expansion packs) and the guitar controller provided by Activision being used as a musical instrument (packaged with the software or sold standalone) are covered by the ... patent," Gibson's law firm said in its January 7 letter. "Gibson requests that Activision obtain a license under Gibson's ... patent or halt sales of any version of the 'Guitar Hero' game software."

We're not sure Gibson should have been allowed the patent anyway - didn't Fisher Price have a plastic guitar-shaped toy with buttons you could press to make noise on the market about two decades ago?