Re: [dvd-discuss] ClearChannel Plays It Safe

["Harold Eaton" <haceaton(at)hotmail.com>]

Bryan Taylor <bryan_w_taylor@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>Responsibility means accountability and non-repudiation. If you do 
>something,
>you are responsible for it when you acknowledge and accept that you caused 
>the
>effects it produces.

That's a pretty narrow definition of responsibility - all it requires
is admission. Suppose damages are created - does responsibility stop
at admission? I think not.


>The idea that you have an obligation to use your resources to communicate
>messages against your will sounds more like involuntary servitude to me, 
>which
>violates the 13th amendment.

The RF spectrum is in no way "YOUR" resources - I cannot use them
while Clear Channel can. The government organized it this way and most
radio stations paid absolutely nothing for this privilege.

> > > A private entitiy, such as a radio station has no legal or moral
> > > obligation to communicate a message to your liking.
> >
> > The use of public resources brings the responsibility of public service.
>
>What is the legal basis for this? Public service is an entirely voluntary
>activity as far as I'm concerned. It might be admirable, but it certainly 
>isn't
>obligatory.

Actually the FCC grant of the station licenses was the legal basis
for the public service requirements - that's why the monopolies
were granted for free. It's just that the current FCC brass doesn't
care to enforce the public service requirements so they readily accept
token service as adequate.
>
>Due process of law requires whatever consideration must be given for use of
>public resources to be specified unambiguously ahead of time. Often the 
>public
>service IS the use of the public resource.
>
>What public resource is consumed by radio or TV? As far as I can tell, the 
>use
>of public frequencies to communicate doesn't require any public resources, 
>and
>it only increases the public's access to ideas. As I've said, the problem 
>with
>the FCC is their needless exclusion of small players from the AM and FM 
>bands.
>
> > > In fact, just the opposite, they have the right not to.
> >
> > They have the right to use the public airwaves, but not HOWEVER they see
> > fit.  Some of the restriction is legal and some is moral.
>
>I think the rights to broadcast on a frequency are a ownable asset, not a
>public resource. The government should be involved only to the extent 
>needed to
>assure that property rights are respected.

Resources need not be *consumed* to be resources. Consider water: it
is almost never consumed (broken into constituent atoms), it just
circulates round and round like electrons in a power lines. Still it
is a resource of limited extent - not everbody can use the same water
at the same time.  Perhaps you would have no problem with granting
a few elite corporations free rights to all water flowing through
major rivers in the US with only the public service requirement that
they "use" the resource. If they chose to "use" it in such a way that
your city (or state for that matter) should just shut up and accept it
since it's their ownership right to do as they like and there is no
public interest in doing otherwise! Property rights damn it! We've
got to protect their property rights! They BUILT the damns that stopped
the water from getting anywhere near your lips after all!


>I have no doubt that companies use their broadcasting rights in a way that 
>they
>feel is moral. When you disagree, don't listen to them.

Suppose that a single corporation was granted broadcast rights to all
broadcast medium and they were the only ones able to rapidly reach
a nationwide audience. You argument sees no problem with this situation
and we're probably less than 100 years away from that situation given
current trends. Just turn them off if you don't agree - never mind
that they effectively control what most of the population thinks by
controlling what information they can get easy access to.

>
> > But a corporation cannot be moral.  It can ONLY make decisions based on
> > what maximizes shareholder value.  In the realm of commercial
> > broadcasting, this means service to the sponsor, not to the public.
>
>That's silly. Companies do things all the time purely for altruistic 
>reasons.
>You should examine some of the big checks that various corporations have
>written this week to the Red Cross.

Strange, most of them have also paid for advertisements to state exactly
how much money they're giving... as PURE altruism as you'll ever find.
I do agree that corporations are perfectly able to act morally, 
evengenerously on occasions. However they're also able to act selfishly,
unethically, and even illegally much of the time and in most corporate
crime cases the punishments are insignificant. Imagine a punishment of
being struck by a 10 J projectile with 30 cm^2 cross section. A person
wouldn't care very much, but it would certainly kill a fly. This is
quite a comparable situation to 10 years imprisonment for an individual and 
$500,000.00 fine for a big multi-national, but that's exactly the
sort of injustice met out in courts all the time.
...

>You are expressing a dissenting view about how things "should be". I hope 
>that
>you recognize that "as is", legally, this isn't true. Legally, the rights 
>to
>broadcast are an ownable private resource.
>

So you believe that if the FCC revokes a radio statio's license for
repeated indecency fractions that the station would be able to sue
for damages under a "takings" premise even though they paid nothing
for the rights??

Recent new spectrum allocations have been done on an auction basis,
but you seem to be unaware that before that recent change, licenses
were free (except for that pesky public service requirement) to those rich 
and powerful enough to get them.  But hey, now that they've got
those rights over the airwaves on your property, it's their private
property.

Supose you own a very large tract of land and set up a
low power transmitter at the center such that only a very sensitive
radio receiver with a very high gain (i.e. highly directional
antenna) aimed straight at your transmitter could even detect the
RF presence from outside your property.  This could never cause
interference to anybody outside your property, yet you'd be in violation
of federal law for using the "private property" of folks like
Clear Channel.  That's a hell of a property right they've
got there.

For what it's worth, I'd ask you what is the constitutional authority
for federal grants of broadcast licenses? I can't think of any
beyond commerce, but a great many radio and television stations are not 
receivable in other states, so what justifies federal licensing of
those stations?  Doesn't the 9th and 10th amendments reserve the right
to generate EM waves to the people or the states? After all Ben Franklin did 
it without governement interference or regulation
(even if he didn't know it).


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