Landowners Warned of Potential Liability of Up to $2,000,000 for Pirate Radio Operations on Their Property

The FCC yesterday designed community four letters to landowners warning them that there were unlicensed FM radio functions coming from their attributes and warning that, if the transmissions continued previous the 10-business day reaction period, the landowners could be held liable for penalties up to $2,000,000 for the unlicensed functions coming from their properties.  The letters have been sent to landowners in Summerville, Oregon Baltimore, Maryland Kissimmee, Florida and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

These actions observe the 2020 enactment of the federal PIRATE Act which improved prospective fines on operators of unlicensed radio stations to up to $100,000 for every working day, and up to $2,000,000 in the combination.  The act licensed fines not only on pirate radio operators themselves, but also on everyone who “knowingly does or causes or suffers to be accomplished any pirate radio broadcasting,” which seemingly authorizes the sorts of fines threatened in yesterday’s notices directed to the landowners the place pirate radio stations run.  As operators may possibly be really hard to identify, the means to look for penalties in opposition to landlords, who are quickly identifiable from nearby land data, provides the FCC a a great deal more powerful resource with which to battle pirate radio operators.  We previous wrote about FCC actions from pirate radio in connection with settlements with operators in mid-2020, so these actions may well signal that the FCC is once again hunting to implement the prohibitions towards unlicensed operations.