Pirate radio: a revolt that just won’t die (even with $30,000 fines)

A pirate FM radio station in Dorchester, MA gets hit with a $30,000 FCC fine. …

"All right people!" the deejay from Datz Hitz radio proclaims. "We got the Halloween party to talk about. The Thanksgiving Joint coming up. Some things in the entertainment industry that are going on." Plus a shout out "to evveerrrybody in the Wellsley Pediatrics Department. Rita, I lovvve you!!!"

Until a few days ago, Datz Hitz was broadcasting gospel and Caribbean music to Boston neighborhoods Mattapan and Dorchester—plus news and live discussion about local cultural and neighborhood events. Its 99.7 FM signal had a range of a few city blocks—maybe a mile on good days. One of the staffers, with whom we briefly spoke, described the operation as a community radio station.

But on October 1, the Federal Communications Commission hit this local service with a proposed $30,000 fine. Datz Hitz, of course, is a pirate operation, which has no legal FCC license. Now it just streams over the Internet.

Locate the source

The Commission's Enforcement Bureau got wise to Datz Hitz in the usual way. A year ago, a licensed broadcaster in the area complained about interference with its signal. So the authorities drove out to Mattapan in one of their signal detection vans, eyes peeled for the tell-tale homemade tower and coax line stringing out of a basement or attic, which they found.

In the FCC's own words:

The agents used direction-finding techniques to locate the source of the signal on 99.7 MHz to a two-story, multi-family dwelling at 61 Ormond Street in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. They observed an antenna mounted on the roof of the building with a coaxial cable leading to a basement window. The agents then took field strength measurements and determined that the broadcast signals exceeded the limits for operation under Part 15 of the Commission's rules ("Rules") and therefore required a license. A review of the Commission's records revealed that there was no FCC authorization to operate a radio station on 99.7 MHz in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

Next, the feds got out of their truck, walked over to the house, and knocked on the door. A resident greeted them and led them to the basement. There, "the agents observed radio station equipment, which included an RF amplifier, an FM modulator with a front panel display reading 99.7 MHz, and a power supply."

The government left a Notice of Unauthorized Operation (NOUO) with the house, then met with the station's owners, Robert Brown and Lloyd Norris, warning them to shut the station down. This they did—at least for a day or two. When the FCC rechecked on the situation this February, Datz Hitz was back up and running, hence the proposed $30,000 penalty.

It's usually $10,000 for each owner, the Notice of Apparent Liability explains, but the FCC obviously thought these guys were special: "We find that an upward adjustment in the forfeiture amount is warranted because [Brown and Norris] operated an unlicensed radio station with full knowledge that such activity violated the [Communications] Act and the Rules."

8-in-10

A Datz Hitz spokesperson told us the station has a lawyer and will appeal the fine. We're not optimistic about the signal's legal chances. But even if the station stays off the air, it's just a matter of time before a new one pops up. When someone last counted, there were no less than ten pirate stations in the Boston area, and hundreds more across the United States. Why do they bother?

First, people love them. Run by volunteers, such stations tend to be more local and more accessible than licensed commercial radio stations. (Read Sue Carpenter's engaging history of her pirate radio adventures in San Francisco and Los Angeles for some context.) An unlicensed signal sometimes airs more local music in a day than legit commercial operations do in a year.

Second, the FCC can't keep up with them. In fact, a new pirate operation just surfaced in my home town. And as my two favorite pirate radio watchers John Anderson and Paul Riismandel point out, the worst that can happen to pirates in 48 states is fines and government seizure of equipment (and you can replace the latter at the cost of an old Honda Civic).

The tougher states (complete with put-you-in-the-pokey laws) are Florida and New Jersey. Last year those two and New York accounted for almost 70 percent of all enforcement actions. But those crackdowns had little deterrent effect on piracy, Anderson notes.

"You've still got a better than 8-in-10 chance of committing electronic civil disobedience and getting away with it with nothing more than a wag of the finger, via certified mail," he concludes.

No comparison

Third, for all the hoopla about how streaming and mobile audio will sweep old school FM away, it just isn't happening. Here's the problem: bandwidth costs money. Public Knowledge's John Bergmayer has a revealing interview with Ken Freedman, manager of Jersey City's WFMU-FM that gets to the specifics.

John: Now, how much does bandwidth cost as opposed to keeping your different FM transmitters going?

Ken: Oh, there's no comparison. It's so much more expensive to pay for bandwidth than, you know... The costs of operating an FM transmitter are minute compared to everything we spend for streaming, and we buy bandwidth in bulk. Now, we just buy huge, huge contracts of bandwidth. So, we're only paying, I don't know, we're paying $5 or $10 a meg of throughput because we buy so much of it.

Finally, there's the cost to end users. Millions of Americans, especially the 14.3 percent who live below the poverty line and those just above that dividing point (like Datz Hitz's audience in Dorchester and Mattapan), haven't got the scratch to get their radio streamed through smart phones. They're going to keep listening to FM.

It would be nice if the Senate would finally get around to passing a bill that would make it easier to open Low Power FM stations—it's already gotten by the House. But even if the modest provisions in that law get to the President's desk, pirate radio isn't going away.

Most of these operations are funky, strange, and deservedly short-lived. But others are local and accessible, and not infrequently honor the FCC's public interest rules far more intently than the licensed commercial signals that try to shut them down.

Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar