Page 370 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

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2002; Coombe, Rosemary J. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship,
Appropriation, and the Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998; Halbert, Debo-
rah J. Intellectual Property in the Information Age: The Politics of Expanding Ownership
Rights. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1999; Haynes, Richard. Media Rights and Intellec-
tual Property. Edinburgh: University Press Ltd, 2005; Sell, Susan K. Private Power, Pub-
lic Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property. Cambridge: University Press, 2003;
Thierer, Adam & Wayne Crews, eds. Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property in
the Information Age. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2002; Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copy-
rights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity.
New York: University Press, 2001.
Carl McKinney

Pirate radio

“Radio pirates” are those who broadcast without a license. Thus it follows
that the first radio pirates were actually the early inventors of the 1900s like
Guglielmo Marconi and Reginold Fessindon, themselves unlicensed because,
of course, there was no license to be given out at a time when the medium was
only just being invented. The term “pirate broadcaster” was initially used to
describe amateurs who stepped on another hobbyist’s signal, and was coined
at a time when there was no government regulation of the airwaves. Today,
some activists prefer the term “microbroadcasters” or “free radio,” arguing that
they are not criminals but rather, more like revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas
Paine.
Pirate radio broadcasters have emerged—and continue to emerge—all over
the world, in places that lack sufficient legal means for citizens to have access to
the radio waves. They operate in opposition to government-controlled airwaves
as a crucial means of providing information and news during times of civil war
and unrest, and for some, just for fun, or “because we can.” Governments have
used pirate radio as a means of broadcasting clandestine information across
otherwise closed borders. Even in an era of increasingly Internet-based radio
listening in the United States, FM pirate radio stations continue to emerge as
forms of resistance to the corporate domination of the airwaves, and as alterna-
tive media outlets in their own right, in large part because radio is an affordable
technology, easy to operate, and accessible for listening audiences.

radio regulation and the deVil?

In 1925, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson sent a telegram to then secretary in com-
merce Herbert Hoover, imploring him to “Please order your minions of Satan to leave my
station alone. You cannot expect the Almighty to abide by your wavelength nonsense. When
I offer my prayers to Him I must fit into His wave reception. Open this station at once” (Had-
den and Swann 1981, pp. 188–89).