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Federal agents raided Gibson Guitar recently, entering factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. It isn’t the first time the government has visited the iconic company. In 2009, federal agents seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been fighting over the instruments and wood in a case with the satirical name “United States of America vs. Ebony Wood in Various Forms.”

The question in the first raid seemed to be whether Gibson had been buying illegally harvested hardwoods from protected forests, such as the Madagascar ebony. If Gibson did knowingly import illegally harvested ebony from Madagascar, that wouldn’t be a negligible offense. Pete Lowry, ebony and rosewood expert at the Missouri Botanical Garden, calls the Madagascar wood trade the “equivalent of Africa’s blood diamonds.”

The tangled intersection of international laws is enforced through a mountain of paperwork. Recent revisions to 1900’s Lacey Act require that anyone crossing the U.S. border declare every bit of flora or fauna being brought into the country. One is under “strict liability” to fill out the paperwork, and without any mistakes.

It’s no longer just Gibson that needs to “fret.” Musicians who play vintage guitars and other instruments made of environmentally protected materials are worried the authorities may be coming for them next. “Even if you have no knowledge, despite Herculean efforts to obtain it, that some piece of your guitar, no matter how small, was obtained illegally, you lose your guitar forever,” laments John Thomas, a law professor at Quinnipiac University and blues guitarist. “Oh, and you’ll be fined $250 for that false or missing information in your Lacey Act Import Declaration.”