Well, the bandwidth was just sitting there… because it was available to a station with a wattage that would meet the needs of the community the FCC wouldn’t license at the time, and a 50,000 watt station they would license wouldn’t fit in it. We were hoping to, as I said, puch a legal test case to force the FCC to take telecommunications acts seriously and allow us to apply for permission. Yes, it was civil disobedience. IIRC Rosa Parks just plopped herself in a seat against the law as well, also as a test case. This isn’t my preferred method of doing things but sometimes it’s necessary.
I’d like to see a cite on us breaking copryright law. Maybe we did but I don’t know that to be true. As I understand it, you ‘steal’ someone’s material when you make or try to make money by using it in a venue you charge people to hear it in, whether via commercials on the radio or in a bar. No one was trying to make a penny off of anyone’s music on our station; in fact just about every small band and rapper in Philadelphia sent us free copies of their material for airplay. There were even out of city record labels sending us stuff. Free. They couldn’t get airplay on the 50,000 watt megastations and loved what we were doing.
Most of the music I played was by obscure acts and labels that disappeared decades ago and no one was around to collect royalties. That’s why my show was called “The WABAC Machine” and I was “Mr. Peabody.” “Quiet, you!”
Please don’t suggest we were screwing over artists when we were supporting them.
Could it be possible that the pirate stations like the thrill of being a pirate station?
I mean it seems stupid to state, but drives the argument; If a pirate station was licensed, it would no longer be pirate. Much of the character/personality/culture of the station would be removed once licensed.
Slight Hi-jack:
What about shortwave? I figure there are about 30-40 availible FM station ‘slots’ on the band… would SW become more represented in the US if the FCC ‘sold’ the idea of selling bandwith there? Christian SW stations notwithstanding…
Sure, there’s a thrill to the pirate thing. (In our case there were also warrentless raids that we invoked constitutional law to turn away; this would usually be enough to ward off thrill seekers.) There are single individuals who operate pirate stations in this fashion, changing frequencies, playing games with the medium. They’re disruptive and they tend not to stick around long enough to get caught, or often even noticed. But stations like Santa Cruz in the OP are community-driven. Here in Philadelphia some of the staff from Radio Mutiny started the legal Radio Volta a few yrs later when the rules were comparatively favorable to it. This tells me we have people who genuinely wanted to run a radio station for their area, and couldn’t get a license.
Shortwave: I think now you also have to take international bandwith allocation agreements into account, I don’t think the FCC can just start carving that up just for Americans. This is well out of my area of legal knowledge, although I have enjoyed SW (esp. before the internet!)
In any event, what about the Average-Joe American public’s right to participate in radio ownership outside of 50,000 watt multi-million $ licenses? It’s kinda like saying, “You got plenty of National Park land in Wyoming, that can be yours to hike in… why not just cede the California public lands to timber companies?”
There are several issues at play here. First, the cost of a broadcast license reflects what the market will bear. If there are few licenses available, the cost of one license will be higher than if there were many licenses available.
Second, noncommercial FM stations are restricted to between 88.1 and 91.9 MHz. (There are some exceptions to this, but I’m explaining in general terms, not writing a thesis.) Those are precious few available frequencies. There is a lot of competition for those frequencies among such diverse interests as colleges, public groups, and religious organizations. Right now, in fact, there is a moratorium on new educational noncommercial stations in this frequency range. However, according to this FCC page, there is no filing fee for the license paperwork, if or when they lift the moratorium.
Crandolph, you’re under the impression that the airwaves are some limitless resource that is there for the taking. It’s not. It’s regulated for some fairly legitimate reasons. Imagine that one of the local colleges wanted to start a radio station, but couldn’t because you were using that frequency? Without regulation, the airwaves would be chaos.
That’s odd, I don’t recall writing any of those things… I think the National Parks metaphor is apt [Lisa Simpson voice]It’s apt! Apt!!![/Lisa Simpson voice] precisely because those lands are limited.
And people in pirate radio generally aren’t against regulation per se, but against the manner in which that regulation has been done. Like I wrote earlier, the FCC became packed with industry people over the past few decades who thought that having 50,000 watt megastations (which usually only radio conglomerates could afford) was a priority and that lots of small licenses that would reach smaller communities needed to be eliminated to accomodate this.
This extends even to college/noncommercial radio (this is where NPR comes in, now on the side of commercial broadcasters on the issue); in the case of Philadelphia you have WXPN, which is now a ‘professionally’ run “college” station of the U of Pennsylvania (college students are no longer allowed anywhere near it; they pay DJs and hosts) that is broadcasting through the tri-state area of eastern PA, NJ, DE… and has pretty much gone into AOR ‘adult’ music dictated by the labels that send them music. They rake in a lot of cash in pledge drives (and what are in reality commercials but are called “sponsor messages” or some other such euphemism), as well as the money they get from the university, and this now goes to a larger staff who are paid much more than before.
When I was in high school, WXPN was a smaller wattage college station on a different frequency that let the students have shows, focused on the West Philly community and left a whole lot more bandwidth open through big parts of 3 states which could be used for other small, community-oriented stations. Big difference.
My question to the post-1990 WXPN (and other similar stations, not just picking on them) is, “What if communities in your area, which is now 5.5 million potential listeners, wanted smaller community licences where you are broadcasting in areas your programming doesn’t serve?” XPN now is taking up a lot of non-commercial bandwidth in some incredibly poor, mostly non-white communities to broadcast beyond them to far suburbs where more affluent people can send pledges and hear the Volvo ads. I have trouble figuring out how this jibes with American federal communications act mandates stretching back 80 years.
This may be the 3rd or so time I’m stating this, but most pirates are/were looking for a way to cheaply serve their community (making everyone in the neighborhood buy radios with SW frequencies for their house and car wouldn’t necessarily do the trick), do not accept advertising, and would not mind reasonable regulation which community groups could afford.
