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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.
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...
> 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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.