And it begins: man arrested for shooting down drone

[230RN]

I'm thinking some kind don't of hand thrown bolo type device. If it's over my property close enough I could tag it with something li, e that it was too close.

I was thinking fishing arrow or SCUBA spear gun with line.  Not much range, though.  Or a ball of string shot out of a compressed-air spud-gun like device.  Or, pushing the limits of practicality even further, a catapult.

I'll bet there would be a quick legal resolution if it involved peeping into a girl's/women's dorm or sorority house.  Darned quick.

Terry

[Hawkmoon]

Interesting case. If I stand on the sidewalk and take pictures of your house, that is legal. It seems like doing the same thing, but with an overhead drone would be legal as well. But is there an expectation of privacy that would be violated, if say the home owner was sunbathing in the backyard? Would that apply to manned helicopters or ultralights as well? Could be some new precedent about to be set here.

There's an entire question of air rights to be explored here. If you own a parcel of land, you own (unless you sold them) the rights to whatever is under that land, down to ... dunno. Pretty deep, I guess. What about going up? At what height/altitude do you lose the right to control who or what intrudes onto your property airspace? The fact the rural or suburban zoning laws don't allow more than a two- or three-story house doesn't mean that you don't own higher than that -- it just means the jurisdiction has decided it doesn't want to look at tall buildings.

So how high does a property owner control, and get to defend against trespass? 50 feet? 100 feet? 500 feet? All the way up to FAA minimum altitude for aerial navigation?

[230RN]

I might suggest that the higher you go, your rights are diminished by the inverse square law.  Only half-joking, though.



Your property is at the first spherical surface 1, 4000 miles away from the center of the earth.  Call it a "plane" for now.

Your property rights are diminished by 1/4 at the second plane, 8000 miles up, and by 1/9 at the third plane, 12,000 miles up, or 3 times the radius of the earth.

Still just half-kidding, but it might provide some kind of legal-mathematical rubric for solving the problem with perhaps some legally-defined but arbitrary values for the various variables.

I have a half-baked idea of how to handle these variables, but that's too complicated for now.

Hmmm.. maybe I'm not kidding, after all.

Terry, 230RN

[Tallpine]

A drone over my house is about 1/8 mile inside my property lines.

Anything within shotgun range is fair game 

[MechAg94]

There's an entire question of air rights to be explored here. If you own a parcel of land, you own (unless you sold them) the rights to whatever is under that land, down to ... dunno. Pretty deep, I guess. What about going up? At what height/altitude do you lose the right to control who or what intrudes onto your property airspace? The fact the rural or suburban zoning laws don't allow more than a two- or three-story house doesn't mean that you don't own higher than that -- it just means the jurisdiction has decided it doesn't want to look at tall buildings.

So how high does a property owner control, and get to defend against trespass? 50 feet? 100 feet? 500 feet? All the way up to FAA minimum altitude for aerial navigation?

I figure they will when celebrities get tabloid drones hovering over their property.  Maybe politicians too. 

That might actually be the quickest way to force privacy regulations.  Set up a group to hover camera copters over politicians homes.

[Marnoot]

I figure they will when celebrities get tabloid drones hovering over their property.  Maybe politicians too. 

That might actually be the quickest way to force privacy regulations.  Set up a group to hover camera copters over politicians homes.

No, they'll just make it illegal to fly them over the homes of "public figures".

[Ben]

No, they'll just make it illegal to fly them over the homes of "public figures".

Probably ten years ago now, a California dotcom couple who were into being "citizen scientists" decided to do a coastal photography project. They hired a helicopter and flew the entire CA coast to create a coastal imagery archive as a baseline for things like coastal erosion, etc.  I recall they were sued by several celebs - I think Barbara Streisand was one of them - because the photos included their cliffside homes. So that "public figures" precedent has been set. I'm too lazy to Google the whole thing again, but if memory serves, the suits were dismissed.

[Firethorn]

Anything within shotgun range is fair game 

Going by how coastal territory used to be set - cannon range, I think it works, at least for now.

Basically, as long as it can be carried by the average person and the shot is small enough that it won't be dangerous coming back down when shot 'up' at only a 45' angle(maybe 60), that's the legal accepted range for the airspace you control above your property.  Exempting obvious things like airport landing paths where the exemption would be recorded in the easements.

[HankB]

Shotgun pellet range can be approximated by Journee's formula, which involves multiplying the diameter of a pellet in inches by 2200 to give the maximum range in yards. For example, a #7.5 pellet with a diameter of .095 inches multiplied by 2200 yields a maximum range of 209 yards. For shotguns, there's not much difference from MV, which will only vary by several hundred feet per second from mild to HV loads. That's why many trap and skeet ranges have hard limits on shot size - a perfectly safe setup with small shot may see pellets leaving the range with large shot. (This is for lead shot; steel or tungsten would probably vary a bit, but this is only an approximation anyway.)

When fired upwards, once the pellets come down, even more typical birdshot like #5 and #6 will be largely harmless unless it hits someone in the eye.

Hmmm . . . as for shooting down a drone . . . forget about guns; suppose someone's drone collides with your drone, which is flying over your property . . . who would be responsible?

[Lee]

This is the chance we've been waiting for guys. Let's form a national pirate network of killer drones, and charge companies like Amazon for safe passage.

[230RN]

Going by how coastal territory used to be set - cannon range, I think it works, at least for now.

Basically, as long as it can be carried by the average person and the shot is small enough that it won't be dangerous coming back down when shot 'up' at only a 45' angle(maybe 60), that's the legal accepted range for the airspace you control above your property.  Exempting obvious things like airport landing paths where the exemption would be recorded in the easements.

I demonstrated that once for a friend by firing a 1 oz load of number 7-1/2s straight up.

Didn't really time it, but it seemed like about 20 seconds for them to come back down.  Sounded like rain in the trees.  Two or three pellets hit the roof his truck, but we couldn't find a mark on it.

[Balog]

Probably ten years ago now, a California dotcom couple who were into being "citizen scientists" decided to do a coastal photography project. They hired a helicopter and flew the entire CA coast to create a coastal imagery archive as a baseline for things like coastal erosion, etc.  I recall they were sued by several celebs - I think Barbara Streisand was one of them - because the photos included their cliffside homes. So that "public figures" precedent has been set. I'm too lazy to Google the whole thing again, but if memory serves, the suits were dismissed.

Streisand effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

[Balog]

There's an entire question of air rights to be explored here. If you own a parcel of land, you own (unless you sold them) the rights to whatever is under that land, down to ... dunno. Pretty deep, I guess. What about going up? At what height/altitude do you lose the right to control who or what intrudes onto your property airspace? The fact the rural or suburban zoning laws don't allow more than a two- or three-story house doesn't mean that you don't own higher than that -- it just means the jurisdiction has decided it doesn't want to look at tall buildings.

So how high does a property owner control, and get to defend against trespass? 50 feet? 100 feet? 500 feet? All the way up to FAA minimum altitude for aerial navigation?

Is that true? I recall reading that mineral rights on a property was a separate thing from ownership of the ground, but I have no idea what the actual case law on that is.

[KD5NRH]

I demonstrated that once for a friend by firing a 1 oz load of number 7-1/2s straight up.

I demonstrated it accidentally with a load of 00 fired at an annoying squirrel.  The bigger pellets sting a bit coming down, and the delay is definitely long enough to stand around wondering why that shot kicked so much more than birdshot usually does.  Fortunately, I didn't notice any squirrel bits mixed into the lead rain.

[Ben]

Streisand effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Didn't know they named it. That's great!