In Internet Age, Pirate Radio Arises As Surprising Challenge (ap.org)

K7DAN writes: Just as the demise of terrestrial radio has been greatly exaggerated, so has the assumed parallel death of pirate radio. Due to the failure of licensed stations to meet the needs of many niche communities, pirate radio continues to increase in popularity. Helping facilitate this growth is the weakening power of the FCC to stop it, reports the Associated Press. Rogue stations can cover up to several square miles thanks largely in part to cheaper technology. The appeal? "The DJs sound like you and they talk about things that you're interested in," said Jay Blessed, an online DJ who has listened to various unlicensed stations since she moved from Trinidad to Brooklyn more than a decade ago. "You call them up and say, 'I want to hear this song,' and they play it for you," Blessed said. "It's interactive. It's engaging. It's communal." It's upsetting many congressional members who are urging the FCC to do more about the "unprecedented growth of pirate radio operations." They're accusing said pirates of undermining licensed minority stations while ignoring consumer protection laws that guard against indecency and false advertising.

Comments

Sounds like a good time to get in on the game

[blankinthefill]

I've always wanted to start a pirate radio station just for shits and giggles, and doubly so after watching 'The Boat That Rocked" (watch this one, the UK release, not the US version "Pirate Radio", imo.) The fact that it is apparently infuriating to certain members of congress would just be icing on the the cake...

Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game

[Anonymous Coward]

London has more pirate radio now than it did when "Radio London" was being broadcast from a ship moored in the north sea.

Current radio pirates are putting transmitters on random rooftops getting power spliced from street lighting, and sending the audio over prepay 3g dongles. Whenever they get found, they're replaced almost immediately on a different roof.

They seem to be funded by paid promotion of night clubs and minicab companies.

Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game

[Rob Lister]

We would be without useful radio, television, cell phones--or any other RF-based utility--as we know them today. The airwaves are a finite [public] resource that requires strict regulation to maintain usefulness. If you don't like the way they're governed, change the government. Until then, I applaud enforcing the existing laws.

Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game

[Rob Lister]

...we would have developed tech to have radio broadcast in non interfering ways

If you know of some technology that achieves that and still allows the utility we currently enjoy, do share.

... folks would have slid into non overlapping slots in the meantime

What does finite resource mean to you? There is already a far, far greater demand for slots than there are available slots. Without regulation every slot becomes unusable.

Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game

[silentcoder]

>we would have developed tech to have radio broadcast in non interfering ways

And when we were done with that, we'd have developed anti-gravity devices and eternal motion machines to generate power with.

You can't get around the laws of physics. We live in a quantum universe and there is a finite number of frequencies that can exist and absolutely zero way for two things broadcasting on the same frequency not to interfere.
Maybe we may have developed wifi likes ways of telling sources appart - but that was only possible AFTER we developed networking protocols and digital electronics, both of which depended hugely on tech for early radio to get their start - there is no reasonable way to claim the opposite would have been possible. Digital broadcasting does allow you to put more signals in a smaller band, but we couldn't get there until digital devices got small - which took a long time. Radio was already prominent in homes in the 1940s - when computers took up entire basements.

Not all public resources can be privatized effectively. And many never should. So how do you then avoid the tragedy of the commons ? The only solution is to regulate access so that nobody can abuse it.

By the way - you know what would happen if you build an early Marconi/Tesla style morse-transmitter and operated it right now ? You would fill every TV and radio in 3-block radius with static - on *every* channel. It took time to develop tuners.

Are you seriously suggesting we would have been better off if nobody could operate commercial radio devices until AFTER we developed fine-tuning abilities ? Or if the airwaves, all of them on all channels, simply belonged to whoever bought the strongest transmitter and antenna ? Why would anybody have bothered at all ? You go invest thousands in the equipment to get a station online, and somebody else decides he would rather have your listeners and spends a little more and your entire investment is down the drain - unless you invest even more and build bigger, but then they can too. Every market would either have had no broadcasts at all, or only the broadcasts from whichever broadcaster had the richest investor.

Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game

[ogdenk]

What does finite resource mean to you? There is already a far, far greater demand for slots than there are available slots. Without regulation every slot becomes unusable.

Maybe where YOU live but where I live there's only 3 stations and they all suck. There's LOTS of unused spectrum here but micropower pirate radio wouldn't give you more than 3 listeners since your coverage area would be mostly trees.

Generally pirates do their best to NOT interfere with licensed stations and EAS systems. Stomping on licensed broadcasts is how you get unwanted attention. It's in their best interest to not be a dick. In places like NYC this can be tough though as the spectrum is crowded there. Using a 100W transmitter to cover a small town in the middle of nowhere however, it's pretty easy to play nice with others. The only way you'll get busted that way is if you violate decency laws or manage to steal listeners (or even worse, advertisers) from legit stations.

This isn't about protecting the spectrum, this is about protecting advertising dollars for ClearChannel. Local community radio is DEAD. Pirate radio is about the only way to avoid listening to canned satellite-fed syndicated bullshit. Large broadcasters fought against LPFM so hard that they effectively killed it.

Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game

[postbigbang]

Rich? No.

Think about community public radio stations. Consider those that make investments into for-profit ones, too.

Like other confined resources, there is only so much spectrum. It's juvenile to believe that a 100w station doesn't interfere with others.

Yes, some stations trade for major bucks. It's called: business. Still others are community supported.

Want the facts? Grow up and understand how we got here, and that the radio waves aren't a private little party. Wanna be a DJ? You can be. Wanna serve your sense of community? You can. There are lots of legal indy radio stations out there. They play by a set of rules designed to allow sharing of the airwaves, through the same set of rules that all people to have FM receivers and HD receivers with great audio fidelity.

People that live within the constraints of civility understand the need for rules-- because there are lots of people that desire to do whatever the fuck they want for any reason they want, e.g. uncivil behavior. I don't believe in mandated conformance but I do believe in civil rules regarding finite resources.

Re:This is a problem, why?

[advocate_one]

how about reviewing the licensing and all the other petty laws restricting the community?

Don't forget, all those rules are only there to protect the incumbents from newcomers... regulatory capture to impose costs on them...

Who?

[stephanruby]

Who are these lucky constituents that won't have to worry about false advertising anymore?

You have to admire those Members of Congress, they go after the most hard-to-find targets first. It doesn't matter if those "pirate" radio stations only reach 0.0005% of their own constituency or operate just a couple of hours a month with little or no advertising of any kind. You have to admire the kind of motivation those Members of Congress have at wanting to stamp out those tiny little cockroaches.

If I were the shopping channel network, or ABC, or an internet advertising agency, I would be shaking in my boots right now. After all, if those Members of Congress spend so much of their time and energy going after those little guys, it's only a matter of time before they start noticing all the false advertising going on the biggest licensed television and radio networks, with diamond dealers, phone carriers, cable providers, weight loss products, Duracell batteries, and the list goes on...

Re:After this post...

[Gussington]

Slashdot has a far smaller readership than it did a decade ago. I don't think the "Slashdot effect" is a real thing anymore.

This probably has more to do with the fact that most web servers these days are no longer behind 128k ISDN lines...

obZZ

[Sooner Boomer]

Do you remember
back in nineteen sixty-six?
Country Jesus, hillbilly blues,
that's where I learned my licks.
Oh, from coast to coast and line to line
in every county there,
I'm talkin' 'bout that outlaw X
is cuttin' through the air.

Re:This is a problem, why?

[silentcoder]

> It is also the battle cry against big government. Just enough to be effective without being a burden to freedom or prosperity.

Except that this is an absolutely impossible goal. You can't make government smaller. It is a guaranteed disaster. Whenever you try - you just create a power-vaccuum which is readily filled by somebody else. Initially, this is mostly corporations. As you reduce government size towards your mythic level (which is always described but never defined because those who say it will NEVER reach a level they consider "right") the power of those stepping into the resulting vaccuum grows and corporate executives get replaced by warlords (often the same person).

Now you either end up with a bunch of competing warlords in an endless civil war and your "official government" too small and helpless to actually do anything about it (ala Somalia), or one warlord actually manages to amass enough to quell all the others and you end up with a dictatorship.

The power you fear in big government is GOING to be wielded, there is NOTHING that ANYBODY could do to stop that. The only choice you DO have, is whether it will be wielded by a representative government accountable to you as a voter, or any of the everything else's which are all MUCH worse.

This is one reason I am an anarchist. As such I support the biggest government of them all. A government so large that EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN is an equal member of that government. 100% of the population large. And therefore, much less able to oppress anybody - while having both the will and the power to quell oppression from others.