Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/26/20978243/pirate-act-radio-stations-law-legislation-fcc-haitian-dj-joan-martinez

by Tomte • 7 years ago

84 80 7 years ago

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bobowzki• 7 years ago

I like pirate radio but it's illegal by definition.

They completely fail to mention that spectrum is limited and that you are probably causing interface for someone else.

The right thing to do would be to give them free or subsided licenses.

Nextgrid• 7 years ago

If the spectrum is otherwise used for cancers like advertising then I wouldn't consider interfering with it to be a bad thing.

In addition, I don't think these "pirate" operators have any nefarious intentions and wouldn't wish to actually interfere with any station (as it would be counter-productive to their own listeners, since the existing station would scramble their own broadcasts too) so I am not sure this has ever been a real problem.

elicash• 7 years ago

How much space is going unused? I vaguely remember something back in 2013 about nonprofit groups having a small window to apply for community FM radio stations. But I assume there hasn't been a window since then.

Is that because there's no availability left anymore? Because radio stations don't want competition? Because it'd take an act of Congress and Congress isn't doing anything anytime soon? I genuinely have no idea.

I'd be more or less sympathetic to pirate radio based on the fairness of the legal avenues available. (And clearly I don't know much about those processes.)

webreac• 7 years ago

Illegal behaviour is often what causes improvements of society.

ChuckMcM• 7 years ago

Back in the day I listened to a pirate station that broadcast out of Arizona. Similar to what the article mentioned, that station was run by people who were passionate about music, camping, and what was going on with respect to the National Forest service and the BLM with respect to public lands.

Objectively, they met all the mission requirements that the FCC at the time said they stood for, use of the common air waves for the public good. Their 'crime' was that while they operated a great station the lack of regulatory control meant they were 'at risk' of doing something "bad." They eventually got shut down, the world was not a 'better place' for it.

mc32• 7 years ago

Was getting in compliance too burdensome for them?

For every well-behaved pirate, there’d be many ill-mannered pirates if you didn’t seize their operations.

mindslight2• 7 years ago

"Ill-mannered" ? I can't think of anything more ill-mannered than a handful of companies abusing the letter of the law by "owning" all of the licensed spectrum in a given area, and then filling it with lowest common denominator chum in a race to the bottom.

In this day and age where main societal attention has moved past radio, most of the FM band should be put under a regime similar to 2.4GHz. Preserve the few remaining high power commercial broadcasters to maintain the capability for emergency communication, and let a vibrant ecosystem (without the revenue to pay hefty license fees) regrow on the rest.

(edit: Well, the exact 2.4GHz regime might not be the most appropriate, because the obvious play is to broadcast on every frequency for more exposure. But the spirit of my argument remains - "pirate" operations remain vibrant because they can't be bought up and consolidated the way legalized stations do, and so their operation should be encouraged)

anon73044• 7 years ago

Several thousand in licensing fees might have been too much for 2_3 volunteers or people doing it as a hobby.

http://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-approves-lower-annual-fe...

squarefoot3• 7 years ago

1: being in compliance requires lots of money -> lots of money requires advertising -> advertising to be effective requires finding as many listeners as possible -> finding most listeners requires broadcasting trash -> bye bye small local station broadcasting interesting stuff. If there was a way to be in compliance without shelling out loads of money that would be awesome and we'd see pretty much every station becoming legit without being forced to ditch Zappa in favor of Bieber and the like. The way it works is the reason why, save for a few rare gems, you turn the knob only to hear the same rubbish pretty much everywhere.

And by the way, if anyone likes the genre, my favorite radio station is TMB (The Musical Box) which streams progressive rock from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thanks to the Internet for making it possible. Easy to search for. Direct link to the stream for the impatient: vlc http://142.4.217.133:9740

2: That is actually the other way around. Yes, there are bad apples, and they should be prevented from operating, but there also are loads of people behind pirate radio stations who are sensitive about interference problems and other issues; lots of them are well trained and equipped engineers who fulfill their dream of getting on air with the best intentions. Many also are licensed HAM operators, though for obvious reasons they can't reveal their callsign. Radio Frequency is what hackers did when there weren't computers available; the practice is old.

Interesting forum on the subject: http://darkliferadio.proboards.com/

sh-run• 7 years ago

I'm completely unfamiliar with this, but could they not get HAM licenses and operate on amateur radio frequencies? Or simply turn what they are doing into a podcast?

Or is the issue that their target audience only has access to AM/FM radios?

trothamel• 7 years ago

That, plus Ham radio basically doesn't allow broadcasting. Ham radio communication is (more or less) intended to be between parties that communicate with each other. There are some exceptions, like telemetry, but Ham isn't intended to replace commercial broadcast stations.

whyrlpool2• 7 years ago

Playing music on HAM frequencies is against the terms of pretty much every license, and commercial radio receivers that everyone has in their house and car won’t pick up transmissions on HAM frequencies. Assuming a disproportionate amount of pirate radio stations operate in low-income areas, access to equipment is a high barrier to entry for listeners. Internet radio is one solution, but who wants to listen to the radio from their phone when their apartment already has an FM receiver?

fortran773• 7 years ago

You are restricted from "broadcasting" most things over Ham frequencies.

leggomylibro• 7 years ago

One of the funnier HAM licensing questions in the US is when you're allowed to transmit music. The answer?

"When incidental to an authorized retransmission of manned spacecraft communications"

So...not very often.

dgkhfrt656u• 7 years ago

The FCC's purpose from its inception was to centralize power in the hands of a few powerful capitalists. In a free country, why would the national government have complete control over a radio station that broadcasts solely within a single state or city?

https://reason.com/2017/04/05/roosevelts-war-against-the-pre...

arvinaminpour• 7 years ago

If anything, I think there's a lot of value for having people broadcasting on a community level.

In the era of the internet and hyper-connectivity, we've lost that sense of community and having local broadcasters that don't work for companies and don't have corporate agendas is a step towards restoring it.

The available local broadcast frequencies just need to be shared by people in the community and there has to be a strong sense of accountability for mess ups

Mathnerd314• 7 years ago

FCC interview: https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/podcast/pirate-radio They minimize the regulatory burden and emphasize the dangers of interfering with air traffic control, and suggest internet streaming as an alternative, among other interesting tidbits.

Zak• 7 years ago

Is there a real problem to be solved by this proposed legislation?

Of course, in theory, it's necessary that radio stations not transmit on the same frequency too close to each other, or there's interference. If this is happening in practice, then increased enforcement might well be called for.

If, on the other hand, interference isn't happening in practice, then increased enforcement seems like both a waste of resources and... is there a name for social benefit coming out of things being in a legal grey area?

moftz2• 7 years ago

If demand for spectrum is low in a certain area and there is plenty available for these pirate stations, then just have an easier process to become legit. There obviously needs to be some sort of process to make sure everyone is playing fair, you can't have total anarchy on the spectrum but there could be less burdensome application process for lower power stations that can prove they are operating for the common good. If you are just playing music and running used car dealer ads, you can go through the normal registration process.

whyrlpool2• 7 years ago

A surprising number of radio stations in major cities in the UK started out as pirates. Why aren’t lawmakers in the US instead trying to make it easier for pirate radio stations to operate legally?

glitcher• 7 years ago

And without pirate radio we wouldn't have the "People Just Do Nothing" mockumentary series!

seph-reed• 7 years ago

The U.S. is in the waiting room for a serious house cleaning. As it is, literally everything revolves around some big companies profit margins. If it doesn't benefit that, it's not important.

God I hope we fuck em up soon. They subverted the justice system, and now there's no pressure release for when bad things happen.

fortran773• 7 years ago

I loved listening to the pirate stations in NY in the late 70s and early 80s. WFAT, WFSR, WLAU, etc.

But there are more options today for "broadcasting" over the Internet than there were then.

While I wouldn't want to see any "pirate" face jail time or huge fines for a first or second offence, it still can be disruptive to the legally licensed radio stations that were granted use of those frequencies. Like it or not, the airwaves are a limited resource, and need to be managed and provisioned.

at_a_remove2• 7 years ago

The Great Translator Invasion of 2003 created a situation where the portions of the band where community radio, run by and for residents (local information, for local people), was instead occupied by "translators," replicating signals from religious broadcast networks like Moody.

Between that and NPR behaving as if they were about to be blasted off the air by third adjacent-channel interference from tiny station with pitiful transmitters, it is very difficult to come up with situations where the band is being used as promised.

I am not surprised that pirate radio is still a thing, given this kind of outcome.

thedoir• 7 years ago

What happened in 2003 and where can I learn more about the translator situation?

It doesn't seem to be limited to religious programming. For example, KUSC, a non-profit classical station, has 4 translators. I don't understand why. NPR affiliate KCRW has 5 translators.

at_a_remove2• 7 years ago

"A 2003 FCC licensing window for new translator applications resulted in over 13,000 applications, most from religious broadcasters. Due to the number of license applications, LPFM advocates called it the Great Translator Invasion."

It isn't limited to religious programming but it the major component.

Translators are really just re-broadcast mechanisms, and because of the various oversights in the regulations, the original signal does not have to be over the air or local, so networks can spawn off in parts of the band that were, in the spirit of things, intended for programming created by the same people the LPFM signal could reach: those in the nearby area.

There's a long, long history of lower power stations and tons of inside baseball on the topic. Unfortunately, removing market caps in the nineties caused a wave of consolidation in the radio industry that swallowed up many local stations with higher power. The Great Translator Invasion similarly purged the local stations with lower power.

Despite that consolidation and what you would think would be efficiencies of scale at the cost of programming from locals, many of the media companies that "borged up" the little guys have gone bankrupt. I won't pretend to know too much about all of this, I can only say that due to my contacts in the radio industry I have had multiple points of input giving me an overall negative opinion of how this has worked out over the years.

jeffdavis2• 7 years ago

Maybe the FCC should set aside a few portions of spectrum that are completely unregulated.

Probably a lot of bad actors would show up. But who knows? Maybe most of them would get bored and leave.

blotter_paper2• 7 years ago

This is basically what wifi, bluetooth, and garage door openers use. The sad thing is that they carved out chunks of the spectrum that don't reach as far as the already-in-use TV and radio spectrums. We get the leftover bits for arbitrary consumer transmission, the good parts are spoken for by corporations with deep pockets. I'd like to see the whole thing opened up, it would make meshnets easier to get going.

magduf7• 7 years ago

We get the leftover bits for arbitrary consumer transmission, the good parts are spoken for by corporations with deep pockets.

Actually, no. Check out a chart of the usage of the radio spectrum in the US, and you'll find a shockingly huge amount of it is reserved for the military.

jhallenworld2• 7 years ago

There is an interesting story about the high power side of broadcasting. There was a station in the US, WLW that was 500 kW. This one station reached almost the entire country. The FCC finally limited the maximum power to 50 kW. Mexico had no such restriction, so "border blasters" appeared- high power stations on the boarder transmitting into the US. They ran ads, made money and had huge audiences. Most famous is Wolfman Jack on XERF.

http://www.ominous-valve.com/xerf.html

http://www.theradiohistorian.org/xer/xer.html

http://www.ominous-valve.com/wlw.html

Anyway for low power community radio, the situation is ridiculous. Some part of the FM dial should just be reserved for low power self-regulated radio. The rules are the way they are to protect incumbents and the same thing is happening on the internet. A recent example is when the David Pakman youtube show got dinged by CNN and NBC because he was rebroadcasting CSPAN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z43JMffa1x0

jfengel• 7 years ago

I would expect that radio stations in general were suffering from people switching to other forms of media. If that's the case, would it perhaps drive the licensing price down?

And if the licenses could be affordable, perhaps it would be possible to raise funds for people to do low power radio in that space? I don't know if it would be legal to do it that way, but if somebody presented the FCC with a plan (including details of how they'd self-regulate), perhaps they'd accept it?

magduf7• 7 years ago

I would expect that radio stations in general were suffering from people switching to other forms of media. If that's the case, would it perhaps drive the licensing price down?

Actually, I kinda doubt it. I think radio is a lot like landline telephones: it's "dying", but it's taking a long time because there's a bunch of dinosaurs who still use it and won't quit until they're dead. (Disclaimer: I listen to radio in my car sometimes, but only NPR, not anything commercial.)

So basically there's a captive audience here that won't go away any time soon, and is getting older and easier to manipulate into buying stuff. It's not a growth sector for sure, but it is something a company can put minimal investment into and milk for profit. This is seen now with landline phone service: it's gotten really unreliable in many places these days because the infrastructure is decaying and companies are spending the absolute minimum to keep it going, but they're milking it for profit from all the dinosaurs who refuse to give it up.

bearcobra• 7 years ago

The Reply All episode where they get into some of the history of XERA and John Brinkley is pretty great. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/dvhexl

jhallenworld2• 7 years ago

There is a documentary about the "doctor":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkMXDVBnrv4

Goat glands, oh boy..

leoh2• 7 years ago

Imagine, if you will, that this law was applied to Facebook, Twitter, etc. That you could only see content produced within some number of miles. Without Having so much reach, I wonder if we could devise a system that returns to amplifying local voices and creating community as opposed to louder, problematic voices from afar.

moftz2• 7 years ago

Ideas would spread the exact same way. Most people follow their friends and relatives. Most of those people usually live near you. It wouldn't take much for ideas to spread on a sort of mesh network of these interconnected groups.

segfaultbuserr• 7 years ago

And it's also sad to hear that NPR is a big opponent against micropower radio.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-power_broadcasting#Legisla...

NPR argues that the proposed changes would unreasonably burden its member stations by requiring them to resolve LPFM interference problems. Adoption of the new FCC rules also would jeopardize the extensive network of translators that pubradio stations have built with federal assistance and would upend the commission’s longstanding spectrum policies favoring full-power broadcasters, according to NPR.

“It may be one thing to ‘squeeze in’ secondary low-power facilities into a mature broadcast service,” NPR said, referring to the commission’s original plan for LPFM, “[but] it is quite another to reverse decades of commission policy and rules favoring higher-powered broadcast facilities by elevating LPFM stations to co-equal status with full power stations.”
“The laws of physics have not changed, and a system of full-power broadcast stations serves many more listeners with less interference compared to low-power broadcasting,” NPR wrote.
“We know there are not a lot of low-power stations out there in relation to how many could be if third-adjacency protections were lifted,” Riksen said. “We are really concerned about how many would come into creation when third-power adjacencies are eliminated entirely.”

jeffdavis2• 7 years ago

I recently got into HAM radio a little bit. I like to believe that radio (aside from wifi and cell service) is still useful, but the use cases are getting pretty thin.

There are lots of ways to deliver news. I get the feeling that a lot of the appeal of using pirate radio is because it's illegal.

I know there are a few benefits, like tuning a car radio to the right frequency, and not requiring someone to know how to set up a streaming audio service. But it seems to be a declining use case.

sojmq• 7 years ago

In the days of streaming over the Internet I don't see the need for pirate radio stations.

OrgNet2• 7 years ago

It is harder to track who's listening to which FM station and might be useful if your internet is being blocked or censored

kube-system• 7 years ago

On the other hand, internet radio is useful if your FM station is being blocked or censored.

kragen3• 7 years ago

It would be interesting to see an ISM neighborhood mesh network for broadcasting this kind of thing. With modern openly-licensed codecs you should be able to get decent music quality in 16kbps or less, so a half-duplex channel at 512kbps could carry 32 concurrent transmissions. With mesh nodes every 500 meters, you can use four nodes per square kilometer and spare the mobile nodes from spending battery on forwarding packets when they're not plugged in, or even transmitting signals. If you build the network on a for-profit basis, you can subsidize distribution of $20 radios from broadcasting fees. Is there an equivalent of RTL-SDR for pocket-sized projects yet?

Related: Cory Doctorow’s 2003 short story, “Liberation Spectrum”: https://craphound.com/stories/2003/01/10/liberation-spectrum... https://www.salon.com/2003/01/16/liberation_spectrum/

gleapsite• 7 years ago

A long time ago I used an rtlsdr hooked up via usb-otg in order to track aircraft [1].

I'd be really interested in a minified version that didnt need the otg dongle. Or even a stand alone battery operated sdr that could be controlled with bluetooth? I dunno how big that market is, especially absent a network like you propose.

[1] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ads-b-decoder-rtl-sdr-now-available-...

kragen3• 7 years ago

If a broadcasting area can be 10 square kilometers with 100,000 people in them, and you need 40 base stations for $5000 to cover that, I feel like the infrastructure investment is insignificant compared to the engineering effort. Apparently the market exists.

In the US you could even transmit FM radio at the legal power levels from the base stations too, reaching like one apartment building from each base station.

A bigger legal problem is the copyright question. You could start with music from Jamendo and the Internet Archive but sooner or later your broadcaster DJs are going to want to broadcast Lindsey Stirling or One Direction, and then you'll have to prove in court that it's legal!

OrgNet2• 7 years ago

I did that for a bit too and quickly noticed that not all aircrafts broadcast that signal...

Animats• 7 years ago

Whatever happened to "Community Radio" low-power licensing? Or is a 3 mile radius just too small?

nullc4• 7 years ago

They aren't currently issuing LPFM licenses.

Commercial operators and, in particular, NPR have fought incredibly hard against LPFM even with the anemic power/radius limitation.

aaron695• 7 years ago

I really don't think pirate radio would be interesting if it was legal in itself.

Add to that they then might get mainstream advertisers and follow the FCC and syndicate to wide non-localised areas if legal, destroying everything unique about them.

BLKNSLVR• 7 years ago

I feel the need to mention the movie "The Boat that Rocked", despite being 99% fiction (based on fact), there's a "spirit of the hacker" to it that provides a level of comfort to my soul.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_That_Rocked

tracker1• 7 years ago

I'm curious... if you're mostly doing talk, then wouldn't something around a 32k stream be potentially sufficient these days? I haven't run the numbers, but if anyone has calculated on what it takes to run a web/online stream I'd be interested.

Of course, that precludes music licenses for the most part.

walrus01• 7 years ago

From a technical standpoint it costs basically nothing, you can get a dedicated server with 100Mbps speed quota on a 1000 Mbps upstream, for under a hundred bucks a month.

Sufficient to support a very large number of Icecast stream listeners.

All of the software needed to do it is zero dollars and some combination of GPL/BSD/Apache licensed.

Multicomp• 7 years ago

If we could get cognitive radio going over SDRs, mesh networks using automatic frequency hops to the nearest radio whitespace would become drop-dead easy.

From there, the FCC could issue regulations to the tune of 'use any non-military band for up to X seconds, provided you confirm you are not interfering with any other traffic every Y milliseconds' and the entire licensing scheme of "radio bandwidth is a finite good" could be virtually eliminated. It would be like going from IPv4 to IPv6 in terms of total amounts of available IP addresses.

superkuh• 7 years ago

The lack of technologies like cognitive radio aren't preventing mesh networks. If you're talking the useful bands for data transmission (ie, VHF and up but mostly very up) then the only thing that matters is height above terrain. Unfortunately except for exceptional situations (coastal mountains or megacity roofs) that height and getting power up there costs a lot of money. That's why neighborhood and city mesh networks don't work. And it's why cell networks do.

nullc4• 7 years ago

Broadcast radio is dying to the point that it's difficult to purchase a high end FM tuner now-- pretty much anything that exists is old models. Heck, used XDR-F1HD regularly sell for twice their original price. In many places big chunks of the dial are vacant, and where it isn't a few companies own most of the stations.

The public and the industry needs more pirate radio -- if the political will to undo the regulatory capture that's killed LPFM can't be fixed quickly.

Instead of enhancing penalties, they should instead be limited to actual damages for signal interruption to licensed stations plus no more than 2x whatever licensing would have cost had the FCC been willing to issue a license, which they're usually not.

Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

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