[5String43]

Yep, ebony is fairly commonly used for fretboards. Whether or not its protected, though, depends on the variety, I should think. For sure, Gibson, or anyone else, would have to be absolutely nuts to use woods that did not have a clear paper trail proving that it was harvested and sold legally. (And for what it's worth, several varieties of rosewood also are used for fretboards.)

I wondered also why Fish & Game was involved - only thing I can think of is that perhaps they were looking for ivory, which has been used for the bridges and nuts on acoustic instruments. Actually, the hot set up is bone for the bridge and ivory for the nut (or maybe it's vice-versa; I don't recall now) because these supposedly do optimal jobs of transmitting the vibrations of the strings to the wood of the instrument. Ivory of course is a no-no, but what the manufacturers do is use fossilized walrus ivory, which I gather is OK. So maybe that's what they were looking for.

This whole tonewood thing has gotten to be a big mess. Importation of fine mahogany is tighly controlled, and Brazilian Rosewood is, I gather, all but extinct - I know of one luthier who was buying the stumps of Brazian rosewood trees that were harvested decades ago and just left to sit. That's why specifying its use for an instrument gets you an instant upcharge of $4-6 thousand. Even Koa, which yields a tone midway between the bass of rosewood and the smoothness of mahogany, has become rare and expensive. All these wonderful and beautiful woods we so love have become endangered. That's why manufacturers are experimenting with alternative tonewoods.

As for Gibson, a lot of their stuff uses special woods - mahogany for Les Paul bodies and I think for some models of their Mastertone banjos, maple for other banjos and for mandolin bodies, several varieties of spruce for the tops of acoustic instruments - and yep, the different types of spruce all have different tonal characteristics. You tend to pay more for Adirondack spruce, for instance.