Music as punishment

I guess I’m kind of late on this, but if others have picked up on, I haven’t seen it. And I have to pass it along.

Fortune’s Roger Parloff (a former colleague of mine) examined an interesting question in a March 27 post on his blog, Legal Pad:

The tormenting of Guantanamo detainees by subjecting them to round-the-clock barrages of blaring rock music has raised a thorny, if thus far hypothetical, legal question: Is torture a “fair use” under the Copyright Act?

It seems that some musicians don’t want their music used by the government as a kind of harrassment weapon. Fair enough: Maybe they have an ideological disagreement with the government — or maybe they just figure having their music associated with punishment is bad for the brand.

Perhaps a copyright violation lawsuit is their way of stopping it? Mr. Parloff weighs the answers. After all, as he points out, the practice has become more routine:

In previous years, we would, only once in a great while, see our government use copyrighted music — mainly hard rock and heavy metal classics — to break down a foe’s will to resist. We saw it used in Panama, for instance, to drive Noriega from his palace and then, years later, in Waco, Texas, against David Koresh and his Branch Davidians (with unanticipated results). But with the arrival of the War on Terror and our liberation from previously crabbed interpretations of international human rights commitments, high-decibel music may now be becoming a fairly routine interrogation tool used in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and, perhaps also, an archipelago of secret C.I.A. prisons across Eastern Europe. … Barney the Dinosaur’s excruciatingly monotonous “I Love You” theme … has apparently been found by military intelligence officials to possess powerful, yet so far entirely unrecompensed, coercive properties.