[saul_goodman]

Sadly the system is incentivized to kill off "harmless pirates", especially if they are doing something interesting. It's always going to be in the best interest of commercial broadcast operators to lodge complaints against pirates competing in their band. If you are in the business of selling advertisements on any band of radio (AM/FM/TV/etc), you don't want listeners possibly soaking up air time from anyone else when it costs you money to run your station. So the deck is always stacked against pirates in common broadcast bands. On the other hand, the shortwave broadcast band has much less locality so it's easier to do interesting things on those bands. But of course there's only a fraction of people who actually listen to shortwave broadcast bands, at least in the US.

[RF_Enthusiast]

It should be noted that the Portland pirate was interfering with a non-commercial licensed LPFM station on 90.3, and was operating on the same frequency as the digital signal of a non-commercial community broadcaster centered on 90.7. No commercial broadcast operators had a standing for a complaint in this case.

90.5 MHz to 90.6 MHz contained upper half of the pirate's analog signal, and the lower half of KBOO's digital signal, rendering KBOO's digital signal useless, and blocking all reception on some recievers.

To summarize, the pirate was operating on KBOO's licensed spectrum in the same area KBOO serves and blocking reception of KBOO. It would be a different argument if the pirate was not blocking out another broadcaster.