Source: Man Ordered to Pay for Shooting Down Trespassing Drone – Lowering the Bar
Just in time for celebration-type explosions, a warning comes from Kevin Underhill’s Lowering the Bar: If your neighbor flies his own little drone over your property and you shoot it down (reminding me suddenly of that song, “Bang Bang [my baby shot me down”] and aren’t you going to thank me for the minutes I spent searching for a video of Lady Gaga singing it?)…
Where was I? Oh, yeah. If you fly your home-made drone over your own property and your neighbor’s son shotguns it (reminding me of yet another song), you can demand full reimbursement.
I give you Lowering the Bar’s first paragraphs, with a bolded section that caused me to burst out laughing. (And there’s a picture of the wounded drone, too, which looks like something out of the brilliant, powerful movie, “District 9.”*)
Many of you will be outside this weekend, so a little drone advice seems timely. Or maybe it’s shotgun advice. Take your pick.
Ars Technica reported recently that a drone operator in California had prevailed in a legal dispute with the man who killed his drone. In a one-sentence order, the local small-claims court held that the man “acted unreasonably” when he directed his son to blow the drone out of the sky with a 12-gauge (which his son promptly did).
(Photo: Eric Joe)
According to the report, Eric Joe lives in San Francisco but was in Modesto visiting his parents when this occurred. He brought along what he described as “a homemade hexacopter drone” (seen here post-shooting). On November 28, a hexacopter took to the skies. Three minutes later, after a loud bang, a quintacopter fell back to earth.
There’s much much more to this story, including Underhill’s analysis of the correspondence between the drone parent and the drone killer, and all of it is hilarious. Feel free to read it.
*I fully intended to give you another video, a trailer for the movie, but have spared you from a Doritos ad that blasted my limited patience.