International copyright law is a morass; a mighty difficult thing to navigate. We like to imagine it as a vast military base, crisscrossed with checkpoints and barbed-wire, where only the accredited experts can get in and out. Like the American prison at Guantánamo Bay.
So it's appropriate that real-life Guantánamo may be tangled up with the metaphorical international-copyright Guantánamo. If US interrogators have been using pop songs as torture, as has been reported, then they may owe the songwriters performance royalties.
Howard Knopf, a Canadian lawyer specialising in intellectual property, was first to raise the question. He was responding to continued reports that loud music is being used by America in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. The same songs are repeatedly played to detainees at high volume - until they capitulate.
Babylon, the mild-mannered folk hit by David Gray, is allegedly one of the most popular torture songs at Guantánamo. Speaking to the BBC last week, Gray was incredulous. "That is torture," he said. "It doesn't matter what the music is - it could be Tchaikovsky's finest or it could be Barney the Dinosaur. It really doesn't matter, it's going to drive you completely nuts."
Gray's fury aside, Knopf wondered on his influential copyright blog whether the singer-songwriter might be owed royalties by the US military. Performance rights associations demand that licenses be purchased if music is to be played in a public space.
"Certain collectives are quick to collect money from those in nursing homes, hospitals, prisons etc, on the basis that these are 'public' places," Knopf wrote. "Never mind that the audience is captive and it's their home, like it or not."
Though in Europe artists enjoy the "moral right" to veto the use of their songs in contexts they do not approve of, it's unclear whether Gray, an Englishman, would be able to bar the use of his song at the Guantánamo base, an American territory.
There's also the issue of enforcing copyright law. If ASCAP, BMI or SESAC decided to chase an uncooperative US military on the subject of torture-music royalties, how they would twist the Pentagon's arm? Maybe they could circle the building in a helicopter, blasting out a James Blunt tune? Just an idea.