A crash-course in the dramaturgy of media studies has the mind fully occupied at the moment, but not quite busy enough to do other stuff quasi-related to this site:
Pirate Radio: Radio Survivor’s Paul Riismandel did a follow-up on the notion that pirate broadcasters (do not) go to jail. Only two states – Florida and New Jersey – have criminalized unlicensed broadcasting on their own, as they are hotbeds of activity, and their state broadcasters’ associations are tired of the ineffectualness of the FCC.
After several years of having anti-pirate laws on the books, Paul can find no evidence of anybody being prosecuted in New Jersey; while there have been arrests of pirate ops in Florida, there are no records of convictions.
Intellectual Property: Skidmark Bob had me on PoP dEFECT Radio recently, where we hashed over “Operation In Our Sites,” a federal campaign to crack down on counterfeit commerce and intellectual property theft. The campaign’s first target was nine video-sharing sites, whose domains and assets have been seized, along with the execution of a few residential search warrants.
Short version: this has an historical parallel to the attack on music file-sharing in the early part of the decade. It’s surprising that coverage of the campaign has been so sparse, but these nine video-sharing sites happen to have been the tallest trees in this particular forest, and as such the most likely to get cut down first. It certainly doesn’t portend the end of file-sharing, though.
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