Californian Keeps Pirate Radio Flag Hoisted While Also Going Legit
SAN FRANCISCO -- An avowed radio pirate is coy for the record about his San Francisco station remaining on the air. But Daniel “Monkey” Roberts said a $10,000 FCC fine against him, though unpaid, helped lure him out of the underground into licensed broadcasting. He used a Commonwealth Club civic forum last week to criticize the FCC as having failed to promote community radio against broadcasting behemoths. In a broader discussion of media piracy, Roberts put in big plugs for net neutrality and for voluntary collective licenses as an effective way to protect artists’ interests, in contrast to copyright crackdowns.
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Roberts expressed confidence to us that he'll never have to pay the fine, imposed last year. The penalty is “permanently pending,” because the FCC can’t back up its charges against his defense, he said. “I personally haven’t operated an unlicensed transmitter since 2003,” Roberts said. He acknowledged involvement with those who run an online version of the station. But Roberts said the strongest evidence that the commission has tying him to unlicensed broadcasting by the station was catching him running the espresso machine in its cafe. A notice of apparent liability from August 2009 said commission agents from San Francisco watched him control and run the station. An insufficient response to the notice would bring a forfeiture order, which the FCC would send to the Justice Department for collection if necessary, an Enforcement Bureau spokesman said Friday.
If Pirate Cat “is functioning” at 87.9 FM now, “it’s not because of me,” Roberts told the forum audience. It would have to be fans broadcasting the Internet stream, he said. “That’s my legal position,” Roberts said after the event. The slick white-on-black site of PirateCatRadio.com boasts of a round-the-clock programming stream from a “studio, performance space and community asset” in the hip-gritty Mission District and sports a cat’s skull-and-crossbones logo also available on a $25 T-shirt.
"The Bay area and Florida are really your hot spots for pirate radio stations,” Roberts said. The bureau sees “this problem in those areas,” its spokesman said. Pirate radio can interfere with authorized communications, and in any case it’s against the law, he said. It’s a “significant enforcement priority for us,” the spokesman said, but he wouldn’t rank it.
Roberts is more straightforward about the enforcement nudging him toward licensed radio than whether it got him to quit plying the unlicensed airwaves. He said that since May, he has run KPDO(FM) Pescadero. That agricultural town of about 2,000 is halfway between San Francisco and the resort and university town of Santa Cruz along scenic Highway 1. Roberts said he has options to buy two San Francisco stations. Seventeen people had pledged $1,050 total on the Kickstarter.com by Friday to help “Bring Pirate Cat Radio Back to Your Radio Dial!” Under the fundraising site’s rules, the campaign needs by Oct. 21 to make its goal of $60,000, for a downpayment on one station or to buy the other outright, to collect on any of the pledges.
Roberts has done more than the FCC to promote the public interest in radio broadcasting, he told the forum. He accused the commission of falling short on meeting a “need in large communities for small voices to be heard,” and he called its low-power FM efforts a “feeble attempt” that has benefited mainly “evangelical Christian organizations.” Roberts said he should add in fairness that the FCC has many duties and is “extremely understaffed.”