[HN Gopher] FCC liability for radio pirates operating on your pr...
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FCC liability for radio pirates operating on your property
Author : nativeit
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-07-23 02:05 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jdsupra.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jdsupra.com)
| nativeit wrote:
| > The PIRATE Act [2020, HR583] permits the FCC to fine both
| pirate radio operators and the property owners/landlords who
| permit pirate radio activity on their property. The risk for
| property owners is substantial, with maximum fines of $119,555
| per day, capped at a statutory maximum of $2,391,097.
| basil-rash wrote:
| Wild. How soon until the standard housing lease boilerplate
| contains clauses like "you may not transmit any electromagnetic
| radiation at all under any circumstances whatsoever" as a means
| of landlords trying to cover their booties?
|
| More seriously, I'd be mighty concerned if I were a landlord
| and saw someone putting up a ham antenna, regardless of
| whatever licensing they claimed to have. It's a bad day for
| public radio.
| techjamie wrote:
| General license HAM operator here. The good thing is that HAM
| licenses are trivially auditable as the FCC provides a direct
| lookup on anyone licensed so anyone at all can verify their
| status. HAM bands are typically enforced by fellow operators
| who will work to triangulate and locate people who shouldn't
| be on it. There are even organized competitions where they
| practice locating devices.
| grendelt wrote:
| (Just ham not HAM)
| fortran77 wrote:
| Us real hams (20 wpm extra since 1977) know how to spell
| it. I'm always amazed how "ham" became "HAM"
| evilduck wrote:
| I think the habit arises from people assuming ham was
| also short for something like AM and FM is, or in
| computers, since PC was an initialism, Mac should get the
| same treatment too.
| buescher wrote:
| if you really want to get them riled, spell it H.A.M.
| csunbird wrote:
| Most of the contracts should already mention "No illegal
| activities", which should cover this, right?
| qwertox wrote:
| "How could I know this is illegal, if it was sold on Amazon
| and had great reviews?"
| nkrisc wrote:
| If that's your defense in court, good luck.
| imchillyb wrote:
| The same way you would know that flying a drone, today,
| without a license is illegal in the USA.
|
| We are required, in our society, to keep ourselves
| informed. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking laws in the
| US.
| kstrauser wrote:
| "Your honor, I'd like to enter as evidence for the
| prosecution exhibits A, "Ueber das Gesetz der
| Energieverteilung im Normalspectrum" by Max Planck; B, a Wi-
| Fi router; C, this cheap crappy USB charger; and D, their
| kitchen lamp.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| And as Exhibit E, their housecat.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Such a clause would eliminate 99.999%+ of potential tenants:
| Almost everyone has a cell phone, and also a microwave oven,
| and all of these things _deliberately_ transmit
| electromagnetic radiation.
|
| (And then we have the countless unintentional radiators to
| contend with.)
| ldoughty wrote:
| It also rules out people who use any form of light in their
| household... including candles.
|
| But I do believe the author was jokingly referencing
| landlords adding generic catch-all clauses without
| understanding the issue, and understood it went to such
| lengths, and found that funny. (I did)
| wongarsu wrote:
| You don't even need a light. The tenant themselves would
| emit lots of infrared radiation. Not to mention the black
| body radiation from any other items on the property that
| are hotter than absolute zero.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Or people themselves (IR).
| exe34 wrote:
| these rules aren't there to rule you out, they want you to
| pay their mortgage after all. the rule is to get rid of you
| by terminating the contract if you cause more headaches
| than your rent money is worth.
| akira2501 wrote:
| What they don't want is absentee or paid off landlords
| affording pirates an additional layer of protection. The
| article even points this out, if the building owners
| cooperate, and help the FCC end the broadcasts, it's highly
| unlikely the issue would be perused to that level.
| grendelt wrote:
| > the Notices require each property owner to respond within ten
| days with evidence that the property owner is no longer
| permitting pirate radio broadcasting to occur on its property.
|
| So, like, post a sign "no pirate radio broadcasting plz"? Or show
| how it's in the lease agreement that it's against the rules?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > Importantly, the Act also extended the FCC's enforcement
| authority to property owners deemed to be willfully and
| knowingly permitting pirate radio activity on their property.
|
| Sounds like it. I've never broadcast over radio so I'm not sure
| how easy it would be to hide but that seems to be an important
| factor. It might come down to surprise inspections but those
| still usually have minimum 24 hours' notice, at least where I
| live.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| You pretty much can't hide a transmitter. If you're
| broadcasting with illegal power levels, it's pretty trivial
| to walk around with a directional antenna and triangulate the
| source transmitter. If you're curious, look up "radio
| foxhunting". Some people do it as a hobby.
|
| Your only hope is to set up an unattended transmitter,
| connect to it through the internet, and spend your effort
| obscuring _that_ connection. Creating an untraceable
| connection through the internet is a lot simpler.
|
| Aside: you _could_ actually obscure the location of your
| transmitter by building multiple of them and doing some
| tricks with phase and frequency. Ultimately you 're still
| trying to hide a guy in a crowd screaming into a megaphone.
| They'll find you eventually, you can only make it harder for
| them.
| kstrauser wrote:
| This is all exactly right.
|
| A reasonable analogy is to think of the antenna as a
| lightbulb that either changes color quickly or changes
| brightness quickly to send a signal.
|
| If you find yourself bathed in, say, green light, it's
| pretty easy to look around until you see the green
| lightbulb.
|
| It's very nearly the same here except that radio waves are
| at a much lower frequency than visible light. If you see a
| signal at 14.313 MHz, you can swing an antenna around and
| walk in the strongest direction until you get to the
| source, modulo reflections and whatnot.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Exactly. Consider the guys with absolutely the most reason
| to want to hide a radio station: the military. They're not
| worrying about the FCC, they're worrying about
| antiradiation missiles. Do they have a way of hiding a
| transmitter? Only by things designed to make it look like
| noise and that requires the receiver to know how to
| recognize the signal in the noise.
|
| If they can't hide it, you can't, either.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Do they have a way of hiding a transmitter?
|
| Spread spectrum and/or frequency hopping.
|
| > If they can't hide it, you can't, either.
|
| The reason you can't hide it is because it's an FM
| modulated signal on an actual carrier frequency. It's
| designed to be received by cheap consumer radios in the
| clear.
| dylan604 wrote:
| To hide your pirate radio, you load it up into a jeep and
| only transmit while on the move. talk hard!
| cobbal wrote:
| They have ways to deal with that too.
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/man-put-cell-phone-
| jamme...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Jamming other radios vs broadcast a pirate radio signal
| are not exactly the same thing though. Interrupting
| someone else's signal is definitely going to get people's
| attention. If this was just an FM radio broadcast, it
| would fly much further under the radar.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| >you could actually obscure the location of your
| transmitter by building multiple of them and doing some
| tricks with phase and frequency.
|
| ...Can you elaborate on this? I'm quite curious.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Just another line that will be added to standard leases!
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I broadcast my Pandora/iTunes via FM to my local devices...
| presumably there are wattage limitations, under which one is
| presumed to be _operating for personal use_ (similar to the "car
| adapters" which "plug in" via FM broadcast)?
| grendelt wrote:
| Right. Those are covered under "Part 15" as unlicensed devices.
| They cannot interfere with other services and must accept any
| interference.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Thanks for giving direction; I went ahead and read snippets
| of "Part 15" and ultimately it seems my _unmodified Amazon-
| special FM-antenna_ is probably "too strong," far exceeding
| the ~200ft broadcast limitation.
|
| We'll see if anybody directionfinds me =D --73
| autoexecbat wrote:
| > and must accept any interference.
|
| What does it mean to not accept interference?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Usually dynamic signal boosting to drown out interference
| when it's detected. Big no-no.
| tingletech wrote:
| complain to the FCC
| ooterness wrote:
| If you're the licensed user of a given radio band, you can
| sue people who cause interference.
|
| If you're an unlicensed user, you just have to live with
| it.
| grvbck wrote:
| OT: Many moons ago, I had one of those cheap Belkin 3.5 mm ->
| FM car adapters (my car didn't have bluetooth in any form,
| this was like 2003, but it made it possible to use my iPod
| instead of the car's cassette player).
|
| Anyway, frequency selection was a manual process, and while
| the best sound quality was found on frequencies where no
| radio stations transmitted, it was fully possible to dial in
| an already occupied frequency. Power output was low, but
| strong enough to overpower anything in a 10-15 m radius,
| forcing nearby cars in a traffic jam to listen to my music.
| themagician wrote:
| They are gone now, but during COVID there were a bunch of
| relatively cheap, and what seemed to be pretty decent quality,
| 50-150W FM transmitters on Amazon.com. I thought that was odd.
| They were there for about 6-8 months. Probably not related to
| this but who knows. I remember looking them up from time to time
| thinking about how cool it would be to have a pirate radio
| station in the secluded area I lived in at the time.
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| Someone should put a hidden radio station on one of the
| properties owned by the FCC, or better yet commissioner of that
| agency and see if they fine themselves
| Carrok wrote:
| As someone who has extensive experience broadcasting on "pirate"
| radio, it is great fun, and typically harms no one. In fact,
| during some natural disasters, these pirate stations became a
| great source of up to date crowd sourced information on what was
| going on, even helping coordinate first responders.
|
| Obviously letting everyone broadcast radio-station strength FM
| signals willy-nilly is a bad idea, but going after someone in a
| neighborhood occupying an unused swath of spectrum is not, in my
| opinion, the best use of anyone's resources.
| byteknight wrote:
| Agreed - But if everyone followed this philosophy we would have
| reason to enforce it. Perhaps the thinking is then, therefore,
| enforce before it becomes a problem?
| Carrok wrote:
| I don't think "everyone" has the interest, know how,
| equipment, and time to operate a radio station. But I would
| personally very much like to see what it would look like at
| "problematic" levels. That amount of independent media would
| be truly a thing to behold.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > and typically harms no one
|
| How would you know? If your equipment was operating improperly
| or out of specification, how would anyone contact you to let
| you know?
|
| > these pirate stations became a great source of up to date
| crowd sourced information
|
| This is a fantastic claim that should come with solid evidence.
| I know licensed HAM and other operators do practice and work to
| provide these services, but I've never seen them legitimately
| attributed to pirate stations anywhere.
|
| > but going after someone in a neighborhood occupying an unused
| swath of spectrum
|
| It's complaints based. The FCC does not "scout around" looking
| for pirates. If you step on my signal, I will record it, and I
| will report it to the FCC. If your station has been found and
| is being shut down then your actions rose to this level of
| notice.
|
| > the best use of anyone's resources.
|
| I agree. The airwaves are _everyones_ resources though. It's
| those who abuse the system that create the waste.
| Carrok wrote:
| This sounds like a lot of pearl clutching from someone with
| zero experience in this space, but I'll still try and reply
| in good faith.
|
| > How would you know? If your equipment was operating
| improperly or out of specification, how would anyone contact
| you to let you know?
|
| The stations I broadcast on had websites and Facebook pages.
| Anyone was free to lodge a complaint, but no one ever did.
|
| > This is a fantastic claim that should come with solid
| evidence. I know licensed HAM and other operators do practice
| and work to provide these services, but I've never seen them
| legitimately attributed to pirate stations anywhere.
|
| It's a fair ask, but sorry I'm not going to dox myself to
| provide you with evidence. Either believe me, or don't.
|
| That said I don't think the claim is that "fantastic". What's
| hard to believe about people tuning into a hyper local
| station to get up to date information during an emergency?
| The fact some of those folks were volunteer fire fighters or
| search and rescue makes it too hard to swallow?
|
| > It's complaints based. The FCC does not "scout around"
| looking for pirates. If you step on my signal, I will record
| it, and I will report it to the FCC. If your station has been
| found and is being shut down then your actions rose to this
| level of notice.
|
| Again, we were operating on unused bands of frequency with
| low power transmitters. I promise you there was no one else's
| signal being "stepped on".
|
| > I agree. The airwaves are _everyones_ resources though.
| It's those who abuse the system that create the waste.
|
| If you consider a small, fun, independent, neighborhood radio
| station to be "abuse", then sure, we're the bad guys. I would
| counter argue that you shouldn't need to provide the FCC with
| tens of thousand of dollars to use resources that are going
| unused, and that no one is going to "miss" anyway. It's not
| like the spectrum is some finite thing that can never be
| recouped once used. If someone else started using that part
| of the spectrum at a commercial level, we can just turn our
| low powered gear off.
| jfoutz wrote:
| I'm not in any sense a lawyer. I don't have the time or
| inclination to read all of title 47.
|
| I wonder how well the FCC will stand up after Chevron. The AM
| bits I glanced at look really solid, this is a band, this is a
| channel this is the maximum rate of amplitude change, tidy
| technical details spelled out by congress.
|
| But like, the PIRATE act is pretty explicit, 100,000 per day 2
| mil max. Perhaps there's some other law that allows the FCC to
| adjust for inflation. but the bill, as I the non-lawyer reads it,
| doesn't say anything about inflation.
|
| Seems like they could lower the fine a bit, at least.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| IANAL either but I doubt Chevron will impact this because it is
| Legislation. Chevron gives litigants the opportunity to smack
| back regulations that come through the non-legislative Rule
| Making process. What we have here is the result of the 2020
| PIRATE Act.
| jfoutz wrote:
| I'd think the inflation adjustment is regulation. but perhaps
| the law exists somewhere.
| johnea wrote:
| Having been very loosely associated with some pirate FM in San
| Diego years ago, my experience was that they created no
| interference for other operating stations.
|
| From wikipedia:
|
| "After the FCC complied with the provisions of the Radio
| Broadcasting Act of 2000 by commissioning the MITRE Report to
| test if there was significant interference from LPFM stations on
| the full-power stations, the study showed that the interference
| of LPFM is minimal and would not have a significant effect on
| other stations."
|
| This is all about the FCC acting as guard dog for 99% spam
| spewing stations.
|
| The power limits and operating conditions for low power FM should
| be relaxed, to allow the radio spectrum to be utilized by the
| citizenry.
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