Jason Scott is an archivist and historian of computer and internet history behind such great projects as textfiles.com, which preserves the wonders of the pre-web internet, as well as documentaries on pre-internet BBSs (bulletin-board systems) and text adventure games. Appropriately enough, he now works at the Internet Archive, and while catching up on his blog […]
On Friday, the FCC posted a notice that a forfeiture order (PDF) for $10,000 was issued to Pirate Cat Radio founder Daniel “Monkey Man” Roberts for “willfully and repeatedly violating section 301 of the Communications Act of 1934…by operating an unlicensed radio broadcast station” in San Francisco. The letter is a follow-up to an earlier […]
This post by John Anderson originally appeared at DIYmedia.net and is republished here by permission. Two decades ago, thousands of people took to the air without permission from the FCC to protest the agency’s draconian policies regarding access to the airwaves. The microradio movement conducted a campaign of electronic civil disobedience, demonstrating that there was […]
The Netherlands has been a hotbed of unlicensed radio activity for decades. Dutch stations like the storied Radio Veronica, which broadcast off-shore from 1960 to 1974, inspired the UK pirate radio scene during the same time period. The country still has many stations on the air, many of them explicitly political and anarchist in outlook […]
Last week New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation that makes broadcasting on the AM or FM dials a class A misdemeanor, which is punishable with up to a year in prison. Like similar laws in New Jersey and Florida, the legislation was pushed by broadcasters in the state who cheered its passage. The original […]
In his “From the Editor” column Radio World’s Paul McLane takes up Matthew’s recent calculation finding that pirate radio generates a half-billion dollars worth of jobs. Recall that my esteemed Radio Survivor colleague was riffing off a recent study sponsored by the National Association of Broadcasters that claimed $135 billion in economic output is attributable […]
Here are several responses to my post guesstimating that pirate radio stations produce about 19,220 jobs per year worth $576,600,000 in income. Obviously my finding, calculated in about an hour, was a bit of a stretch. But it has stimulated an interesting discussion, as I hoped that it would. The first response comes from John […]
I have often wondered how many jobs “unlicensed” media produce, be it P2P file sharing sites or pirate radio stations. A new study commissioned by the National Association of Broadcasters inspires me to attempt a rough cut of the pirate radio question. Based on my guesstimate study, broadly modeled on its methodology, I think that […]
It’s been quite some time since I can recall the FCC imploring a U.S. Attorney to issue a warrant to shut down an unlicensed FM station. In fact, it’s quite a rare action, usually reserved for long-running stations that either have been utterly unresponsive to administrative notices or have operated for a long time out […]
It’s been an interesting few months for Pirate Cat Radio to say the least. As we reported, the online-only community radio station broadcasting out of a cafe in San Francisco was taken off the air by its founder Daniel “Monkey Man” Roberts after a contentious call with Pirate Cat volunteers back in February. Roberts, who […]
