It was late afternoon last November. Eric Joe was flying his homemade hexacopter (pictured) in his parents' garden in Modesto, California. Three and a half minutes of flying at low altitude and low speed, suddenly boom! And when I thought that one shot was fired from the shadow of the walnut tree next door, the drone fell to the ground.
It's a 12-gauge shotgun, so Joe went out to pick it up, and Brett McBay, a member of the city board of education, came out with a shotgun. ."When I asked, 'Did you shoot?', he said, 'Oh.
"I thought it was a CIA surveillance device," says McBay. Thinking that arguing with someone with a shotgun here would be pointless, Joe decided to wait until the sun went down and send an email asking for compensation.
Mr. McBay replied:
Joe responds.
Three minutes later, Mr. McBay replied, "Facts are wrong. There will be no further discussion." In the end, Joe filed a small claims court, and the court ruled in full on Joe's side, awarding $800 in damages last month. The reason for the ruling was that it was unfair to let his son shoot down the drone regardless of whether it was flying on his property.
＊＊＊The above is a summary of what Ars Technica reported. Gizmodo adds that it is difficult to interpret this in various ways.
Well, this time it just didn't have a camera, so you can't really tell from a distance. No one wants to be seen or filmed inside a house, but if a drone were to peek inside a house or garden, it would be illegal to see where it is legally IN and where it is OUT. The current situation is that the response varies from state to state. In the first place, the interpretation of the courts is not unified as to whether or not flying a drone constitutes trespassing.
California passed legislation in February to include drones flying over private property in the definition of trespassing. But other states have a long way to go, and even the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is still discussing ways to regulate drone flights.
One of the reasons for the slow progress is the vagueness of where the landowner can claim ownership of the airspace. Since ancient times, the landlord's landowner's ownership range has been defined by drawing a line perpendicular to the ground from underground to above ground. With the advent of airplanes, some definitions have been forced to reassess, and with the advent of drones, the law and the FAA are being forced to draw lines between private property and aviation space. For this line, a Wisconsin attorney has put together an excellent take on the question, "Can Amazon's drone deliveries be stopped by trespassing?"
The line currently being discussed in many US jurisdictions is 500 feet (152m) in the air. However, since it is not a line that was decided after much thought, there are likely to be problems that cannot be solved with this. In fact, with a good camera, you can see inside someone else's house from 600 feet away, violating privacy. FAA safety guidelines for model aircraft (including drones) state that drones must be limited to an altitude of 400 feet (122m) or less. In other words, if you want to avoid trespassing, you really shouldn't fly drones over private land without permission from the landlord. With this, you don't have to worry about being spied on, so in that sense it's a good rule.
In the case of Joe this time, he didn't fly to the next property, but it seemed that he flew on the public road in between for a moment, so at that time, McBay's eyes seemed to have been invaded. maybe.
Since the payment has not yet been made, it seems that there will be another dispute over the walnut tree.
Top image: Eric Joe via Ars Technica
source: Ars Technica
Kiona Smith-Strickland - Gizmodo US [original]
(satomi)