Do You Own Your Air Space?

[What Would Jesus Do?]

Suppose I'm sitting in my back yard, sunning next to my pool, and somebody sends a drone over with a camera. How pissed off am I allowed to be?

Can I blast it with my shotgun (doesn't everybody keep a shotgun poolside)?

Can it bring it down with my garden hose? Or my tennis racket?

If I capture it, is it mine? Do I have to give it back? Can I destroy the pictures?

If I damage it, am I a vandal? Do I owe the owner for repairs?

Can I call the cops? What would they do?

What if the operator of the drone is a journalist? Does he have more protections than the rest of us? What if he's just a "citizen journalist"?

Is there some height beyond which it's no longer in my air space and I just have to put up with it?

[Note, this is not a peeping Tom case. I know there are laws about that sort of thing. In my example I'm in plain view and wearing suitable apparel. Besides, nobody would be interested]

 

[TexMichFan]

If you can't fly over the White House you can't fly it over my house.

 

[22*43*51]

Pre-Drone article.

Before the advent of air travel, landowners owned an infinitely tall column of air rising above their plot. (The Latin doctrine was Cujus est solum ejus usque ad coelum, or “whose is the soil, his it is up to the sky.”) In 1946 the Supreme Court acknowledged that the air had become a “public highway,” but a landowner still had dominion over “at least as much of the space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land.” In that case the court held that a plane flying just 83 feet in the air—the commotion was literally scaring the plaintiff’s chickens to death—represented an invasion of property. The justices declined to precisely define the height at which ownership rights end. Today, the federal government considers the area above 500 feet to be navigable airspace in uncongested areas. While the Supreme Court hasn’t explicitly accepted that as the upper limit of property ownership, it’s a useful guideline in trespass cases. Therefore, unless you own some very tall buildings, your private airspace probably ends somewhere between 80 and 500 feet above the ground. Paragliders and hang gliders can easily soar above that height, so your ability to exclude a snooping gliding enthusiast appears to be limited. (It should be noted that the vast majority of complaints about trespassing hang gliders result from their landing on, not flying over, private property.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...metz_arrest_how_much_airspace_do_you_own.html

 

[linkshero]

Didn't Modern Family do a take on this very thing this season?

 

[naturalmwa]

Cher taught me in the movie Burlesque that air rights are real.

A: Believe it or not, “air rights” are for real, and the deal you describe is entirely plausible. The owner of land generally owns not just a particular bit of the surface of the Earth, but the ground beneath it and the air above it, too. Your neighbor can’t drill sideways into your yard for oil; likewise, he can’t build a deck that hangs over the yard.

Back in the olden days, a land owner owned everything on his plot of land, from the center of the Earth to the outer reaches of the universe. As the English common law classic Blackstone's Commentaries put it, “Land hath also, in its legal signification, an indefinite extent, upwards as well as downwards.” This infinite ownership caused no real problems, since no one could actually get up all that that high, but that changed when airplanes were invented. Technically, airplanes were trespassing whenever they flew above land without permission, regardless of how high they flew.

In United States v. Causby 328 U.S. 256 (1946), the Supreme Court noted that “It is ancient doctrine that at common law ownership of the land extended to the periphery of the universe… ut that doctrine has no place in the modern world.” Instead, the Court ruled that land owners own only the airspace they can “reasonably use,” and that the airspace above that is a public highway.

http://sacramentopress.com/2010/12/11/ask-the-county-law-librarian-air-rights/

 

[h-hawk]

Wonder if someone could make money creating a legal and safe way of shooting an intruding drone down. (Firearms use is prohibited in most communities.) I don't know if an air gun projectile (legal as far as I know) would be enough to stop one of those suckers.

 

[bagdropper]

My 3000 psi power washer with a 0 degree tip goes pretty far. I bet it'd make short work of a drone up to say 75 feet.

 

[naturalmwa]

Wonder if someone could make money creating a legal and safe way of shooting an intruding drone down. (Firearms use is prohibited in most communities.) I don't know if an air gun projectile (legal as far as I know) would be enough to stop one of those suckers.

Use a stick, or a ram.

 

[TJ8869]

Use a stick, or a ram.

Again with the double entendres...

 

[naturalmwa]

Again with the double entendres...

 

[Lone Clone]

Suppose I'm sitting in my back yard, sunning next to my pool, and somebody sends a drone over with a camera. How pissed off am I allowed to be?

Can I blast it with my shotgun (doesn't everybody keep a shotgun poolside)?

Can it bring it down with my garden hose? Or my tennis racket?

If I capture it, is it mine? Do I have to give it back? Can I destroy the pictures?

If I damage it, am I a vandal? Do I owe the owner for repairs?

Can I call the cops? What would they do?

What if the operator of the drone is a journalist? Does he have more protections than the rest of us? What if he's just a "citizen journalist"?

Is there some height beyond which it's no longer in my air space and I just have to put up with it?

[Note, this is not a peeping Tom case. I know there are laws about that sort of thing. In my example I'm in plain view and wearing suitable apparel. Besides, nobody would be interested]

I think there are two issues. One is the airspace thing, but the more relevant one is the presumed right to privacy on your own property. No matter what you're wearing.

 

[theIowaHawk]

Self defense? - reasonable fear of harm?

 

[h-hawk]

Use a stick, or a ram.

View embedded media

Thanks for linking that. I saw only the Chimpanzee part one morning and told my wife about it. Now she can see all the different ways to protect our airspace and our