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Harassed in PA

Look - I don't go flying My drones around on other peoples property without consent of the home owner. BUT What I am saying is you could zip thru the windows of someones barn- With a TinyWhoop ( NOT a Mavic PRO ) in and out the other side and all that could ever happen to you at the most is- you now have a pissed off neighbor and the police arrest you OR site you for harassing the owner. I have been trespassed Flying my FPV, but no harm done I MOVE ON. I cooperate everywhere I go. but I do fly FPV so if I see a steel structure in a construction site on a Sunday morning I might just fly around and get a few "Juicy's" in. I am breaking No law Just as you are not when you fly over someones property. The only person who might lose money is me, Because even though my drone cost 300 bucks I can't break into the property to retrieve it in a crash . I am Harming No-One and I am doing this with small drones. way under the 250 limit. I do have I have one that is 360 grams. But I won't be putting rid on it, I will part it out.
I follow and respect the Law and would not myself just go around doing loops thru my neighbors window. Neither would any of the people in our little FPV group. Some of them work for the city.
Bakersfield allows Drone flight pretty much everywhere except the Oildale area and the Hospital district. I never have a problem with a camera drone BUT if I do the same thing in "My FPV get-up" all the sudden I look suspicious. Heck im almost 60 and I'm doing this. Before you wonder about the legalities or the Hobby head to you tube- throw on some goggles- and get addicted. All comments are well taken and appreciated .
In California you can only be trespassed from the property you are Standing on - you can't be trespassed for where your drone is at- its in the air, and you can't trespass me from the air.
 
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What is trespassing with a drone when you're in airspace.
Are you guys really going to pretend to be this stupid? 🙄

It gets really tiresome.

It's the airspace inside private buildings, around private homes, etc. This needs to be explained?

Now, we're all expert Aviation Law Attorneys here on MPDC, but the other 99.999% of country is not. Including all the drone-ignorant attorneys.

In fact, most people think like the OP. And that's never going to change. The general public, and the vast majority of LEOs are never going to know the FAA has jurisdiction over the airspace, everywhere, over the US.

What's the practical impact of this? Lawmakers are as ignorant as everyone else. So laws like CA CCS 1708.8 are going to keep being made. Violate it, and you'll get cited, and will have a legal problem, regardless of the particulars of how "airspace" is defined.

And guess who's not coming to your defense? The FAA.

You see, you guys are focusing on the utterly irrelevant issue of the word "airspace", which in the public environment I discussed above and judges and juries drawn from that environment, "trespass" is what they're focused on. They'll decide you are guilty of trespassing – which is what 1708.8 is about – and won't give a rat's a** what any aviation authority says. You flew into their barn.

Or did you guys truly think you could hover 12ft over the swimming pool in someone's backyard because the FAA controls the airspace? Really?
 
.....so if I see a steel structure in a construction site on a Sunday morning I might just fly around and get a few "Juicy's" in. I am breaking No law Just as you are not when you fly over someones property.
What does California law say about being a nuisance like throwing trash over your fence onto another person property or if obnoxious fumes and vapors coming from you home invades another or your drone enters their barn thru the door you left open? I don't think it's trespassing but there has to be a law against it otherwise, how can they stop you if you don't want to cooperate?

Just to put this into context based on the previous post, if I am allowed to fly there, I will and I'll take my chances. It's place that I'm not sure I am allowed to fly that I hesitate. I know where the FAA allows me and there are some spaces where someone else besides the FAA has control over.

On another note, believe it or not, these things do get argued sometimes in court since there are two distinct sides to the argument (for which I want no part of btw). For example, here's a different but similar argument:

 
Or did you guys truly think you could hover 12ft over the swimming pool in someone's backyard because the FAA controls the airspace? Really?
No that would be Harassment and IS against the LAW BUT Just because I am pausing to do a few loops and rolls and such -WHY is that any different then you flying your drone over the property in a straight line?
Unauthorized filming or buzzing someone in their backyard WILL get you arrested. flying around in the sky will not. but if the FAA says ok I will do it, why not? Once again Nothing illegal about what I am talking about. You cannot trespass with an object in the air otherwise every guy flying a kite would be getting arrested.
 
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No that would be Harassment and IS against the LAW BUT Just because I am pausing to do a few loops and rolls and such -WHY is that any different then you flying your drone over the property in a straight line?
Unauthorized filming or buzzing someone in their backyard WILL get you arrested. flying around in the sky will not. but if the FAA says ok I will do it, why not? Once again Nothing illegal about what I am talking about. You cannot trespass with an object in the air otherwise every guy flying a kite would be getting arrested.
I'm not as familiar with California law when it comes to harassment with a drone. Using what you see here or based on the California Penal code, please let me know which form of harassment applies.

 
  • California’s civil harassment law, California Code of Civil Procedure section 527.6 CCP, has its own legal definition of harassment. Under this law, harassment is any of the following:
  • a course of conduct that:
    • is knowing and willful,
    • is directed at a specific person,
    • seriously alarms, annoys, or harasses that person,
    • serves no legitimate purpose,
    • would cause a reasonable person substantial emotional distress, and
    • actually does cause substantial emotional distress to the person.
 
  • California’s civil harassment law, California Code of Civil Procedure section 527.6 CCP, has its own legal definition of harassment. Under this law, harassment is any of the following:
  • a course of conduct that:
    • is knowing and willful,
    • is directed at a specific person,
    • seriously alarms, annoys, or harasses that person,
    • serves no legitimate purpose,
    • would cause a reasonable person substantial emotional distress, and
    • actually does cause substantial emotional distress to the person.
This is what I mentioned earlier when I said the police could just get fed up and arrest you. It's not going to matter if you fly a drone over someone's property, over their backyard, in their barn, thru their barn window, hover outside the window....pretty much any drone activity can create enough probable cause to fall under the Cali civil harassment law.

You said "No that would be harassment...." or a crime. But hover 12 feet over someone's backyard pool is not directed at any specific person that you don't even know, if you just hover, not sure how that can be a willful course of conduct, there's nothing repeated, it might mildly annoy someone but not seriously, you're taking pictures of the street but just so happens you hover over the pool to get a good shot, many Americans get distresses at just about everything but a drone isn't going to cause substantial emotional distress any more than serving someone with a subpoena. The common sense in me says there's XX feet and XX minutes to cross this line, but that's not in the statute, and it is vastly different from person to person. Personally, any lower than 30 feet for 5 minutes is where I draw it.

My point of all this is to ask "do you really think flying a drone can be a form of harassment when it's not repeated or it's not intention or directed against anyone in particular, how high does it have to be?, etc." Perhaps if you hate your neighbor and he's told you several times to cut it out and every time you visit with your drone, his daughter is outside....ok, maybe so if that's the example you were using. What I am trying to get at is as a drone community, we have to protect against including ordinary drone activity under such laws. Clearly buzzing someone's head or dropping stuff or similar is a problem. But our FPV make a lot of noise and it freaks some people out. If you lose contact with your drone, it might stop and hover for 10 seconds before it RTH. We can't let these elements of droning become criminal acts to be resolved in a courtroom if you happen to meet up with the wrong people.

To me, these fit more of the definition harassment and pretty sure it could be illegal:



I don't know what to make of this s*show:

 
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Trying to equate a random flight through a structure to trespassing and drone harassment is ridiculous.
The legal definition of harassment is a pattern of repeated behavior.
"Leaving a barn door open" is still making me shake my head some hours after reading that.
Flying through a school teacher's FansOnly studio hidden in a barn....
There are some imaginations running amok here...

Edit for clarity: This was posted with humor, and no ill feelings against any authors of silly accusations...lol
 
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Trying to equate a random flight through a structure to trespassing and drone harassment is ridiculous.
The legal definition of harassment is a pattern of repeated behavior.
"Leaving a barn door open" is still making me shake my head some hours after reading that.
Flying through a school teacher's FansOnly studio hidden in a barn....
There are some imaginations running amok here...

Yup.

That's the point. You have no idea what someone may be doing with their privacy, on their private property, inside their private building.

We'll simply have to agree to disagree here. It's my view that flying a drone inside another person's private property is a violation of their privacy. There are local laws on the books in many, if not most municipalities, criminalizing privacy violations, a.k.a. "peeping tom" ordinances.

I say that just about everyone with no interest in drones feels exactly the same way I do, and are asking for trouble should you fly your drone into their open barn door, only to find it a converted living space rented by a female college student who happens to be changing clothes at the time.

That takes almost no imagination.

She may be just pissed off enough to press charges. Charged with what? The same law you would be violating standing in the open door with wearing a GoPro strapped to your chest.

A judge or jury will decide if you were the same with a drone as a Peeping Tom. And I say they will. You will be convicted. Arguments that you had a right to be there because airspace and FAA, blah blah blah will be utterly unpersuasive.
 
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We'll simply have to agree to disagree here. It's my view that flying a drone inside another person's private property is a violation of their privacy. There are local laws on the books in many, if not most municipalities, criminalizing privacy violations, a.k.a. "peeping tom" ordinances.
I don't know how much clearer I need to be regarding privacy? There is nothing to agree to disagree on here. Nobody is climbing fences to open doors and windows on structures. Nobody has even mentioned flying into, through, or hovering over an occupied structure!
The fact is that several of you are making repeated attempts to construct scenarios where we are invading privacy, trespassing, harassing, and annoying people by hovering over their sanctuary is ridiculous. It has been implied that we physically trespass to open barn doors for fly throughs. Pure assumptive imagination ran amok.

Nobody here is doing what you've fictionalized. I think it is insulting that you even construct such a scenario to frame our behavior after we merely stated that we "Fly through barns" - I've shown you what those barns look like. You all seem to think we are flying through Martha Stewart's barn during a dinner party.
And I can pretty much guarantee Cafguy is not dive bombing occupied barns with his FPV drone just because the temptation is too great.
This is so far fetched and not to connected to any reality expressed in this thread:
"...should you fly your drone into their open barn door, only to find it a converted living space rented by a female college student who happens to be changing clothes at the time.

That takes almost no imagination.

She may be just pissed off enough to press charges. Charged with what? The same law you would be violating standing in the open door with wearing a GoPro strapped to your chest.

A judge or jury will decide if you were the same with a drone as a Peeping Tom. And I say they will. You will be convicted. Arguments that you had a right to be there because airspace and FAA, blah blah blah will be utterly unpersuasive."

Just stop.
You can drone on and one about how right you are when nobody is claiming you aren't - you're imaginative accusations just don't have a basis in reality here and any division is of your own construct. Who here has argued we have a right to trespass, intrude, or harass? Show me that post...
 
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Not taking sides here but let's talk about peeping toms; trying to help anyone reading this thread to think about the laws, please check them in your own state. Sorry about the links to law firm site's explanation (instead of the penal code) but I wanted to capture some of the commentary instead of the boring legal jargon. This should be a good place to start and you can dig deeper for your own reference; ymmv, I am not a lawyer and I don't endorse any of the links. Can you really be a peeping tom or invade someone's privacy with a drone? I dunno, let's find out:

 
If you disagree with what we are talking about then I am thinking you have NEVER EVER flown anywhere but your backyard ,or your own property. right? And if you have flown other places, Is it an invasion of privacy to fly your Mavic 3 Pro over someones property, to get photos of the stream on the other side? or too fly over a vacant lot to get some shots?
The LAW says I am doing no different than you. I was NEVER talking about someones $250,000 She-Shed.
I am talking- delapitated -unoccupied Building- That Even most of the owners could care less about and haven't probably seen in years. The same LAWS that allow you to fly your camera drone allow me to FPV If I break the law I deserve the punishment -Just like you.
NO-ONE is talking about filming someone on their property ANYWAYS- So I really don't know how it got from: Legal use of Airspace: To hovering and Filming. Those are two different discussions.
AND MAY I REMIND YOU -- IS The EXACT argument those people who don't want you flying your drone make.

By the way I appreciate the DEBATE and hope we all can Know that I can disagree with you and still respect you Opinion.
 
I am going to agree that sometimes the argument drone flyer pose against each other is the same argument the non-drone crowd uses against us which is why I implore the drone community to pull together on these discussion and provide as much leeway as you can; otherwise, we're not going to make it, team!
 
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I don't know how much clearer I need to be regarding privacy? There is nothing to agree to disagree on here. Nobody is climbing fences to open doors and windows on structures. Nobody has even mentioned flying into, through, or hovering over an occupied structure!

Yes they have. Read the thread again.

I wouldn't have posted any of this otherwise.

If no one's claiming they can enter a private structure, clearly in use and not abandoned, without repercussions then I have nothing to say about it.
 
Legally I don't have to show the police my ID or give them any information. We've all seen the auditor style videos on YouTube.
I refer to them as "How to Escalate" videos.

Myself, if approached by LEO for flying a drone? Cordial and respectful, ID myself, ask why they stopped, I'll explain what I'm doing, tell them I have flight logs that map my path and show telemetry if needed. Just like I'd show the investigating officer my dash cam video at the scene of an accident if I was in the right. I have no desire to prolong the interaction by being evasive and dodgy, just let me get back to flying and get him/her on back on patrol quickly, and neither of us upset with the other. No reason for a clash of egos, I'm doing my job and he is doing his.
I find I feel more powerful de escalating a situation than I do escalating it.
It's slightly off topic, but as a visitor to the US who is not a US citizen, the general advise you don't have to show ID is not necessarily the case for non-resident aliens like us Canadians.

My understanding of immigration law is we absolutely have to carry ID and show it on demand to any police officer in the US regardless of the reason. Luckily, Canadians are often mistaken for Americans, even in the US, and I don't go around acting suspiciously anyway, so I've never had to deal with that.
 
It's slightly off topic, but as a visitor to the US who is not a US citizen, the general advise you don't have to show ID is not necessary the case for non-resident aliens like us Canadians.

My understanding of immigration law is we absolutely have to carry ID and show it on demand to any police officer in the US regardless of the reason. Luckily, Canadians are often mistaken for Americans, even in the US, and I don't go around acting suspiciously anyway, so I've never had to deal with that.
Sad if that is what you are hearing out in the world. No one is required to "show their papers" except at the border and if you don't you will be turned away. Everywhere in this country there has to be a legal reason to identify yourself to the government (not necessarily true when it comes to private business). It is true that bad things could happen to you if you don't but it's not the law; it's just that many Americans abuse the laws. I believe most people are not familiar with the various laws and rather not take a chance so they comply which is fine if you are visiting. Everyone who comes to this country doesn't get all the privileges that a citizen does but everyone has rights. You don't leave those at the border. Unfortunately this is becoming less realistic every day.
 
Sad if that is what you are hearing out in the world. No one is required to "show their papers" except at the border and if you don't you will be turned away. Everywhere in this country there has to be a legal reason to identify yourself to the government (not necessarily true when it comes to private business). It is true that bad things could happen to you if you don't but it's not the law; it's just that many Americans abuse the laws. I believe most people are not familiar with the various laws and rather not take a chance so they comply which is fine if you are visiting. Everyone who comes to this country doesn't get all the privileges that a citizen does but everyone has rights. You don't leave those at the border. Unfortunately this is becoming less realistic every day.
My sources for this are:




So while you might be right, as a visitor I wouldn't take chances or argue with police if asked to produce ID. I value my relatively easy ability to enter the US, and my NEXUS card far too much to risk it on a minor offence that could bar my future entry.
 
My sources for this are:




So while you might be right, as a visitor I wouldn't take chances or argue with police if asked to produce ID. I value my relatively easy ability to enter the US, and my NEXUS card far too much to risk it on a minor offence that could bar my future entry.
No problem, I wouldn't take the chance either especially if there's no reason to push back. I do the same when I visit other countries.
 
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