I don't think you're correct. According to the cnet article and others, two human witnesses (the shooter and presumably his daughter) claimed that the drone was flying below the tree line "peeping." The owner, however, presented the telemetry from the drone itself which indicated that the drone was higher than claimed when shot down. At the trial level, the court apparently believed the data over the human witnesses--who obviously had incentive to paint a picture a certain way.

What is striking to me is that in making the ruling it did, the appellate court explicitly made a finding of fact that the drone was peeping. This is interesting because an appeals court is only supposed to nitpick a lower court's findings of law unless a high standard of error is met--and even then, it often sends the case back to trial to correct the flawed findings of fact. The appeals court sounds old school--highly over valuing eye witness testimony, and apparently finding something to question about the data evidence, presumably without the benefit of calling more expert witnesses to give a reason for that conclusion. I haven't had a chance to look at the opinion or the trial transcript too closely, but my first reaction is that the judge had a hinky gut feeling about drones or just had sympathy for the shooter, and in her haste to get him off she forgot a bit her role as an appellate judge.

So technically, the appeals court said he was a peeper. In practice, the ruling is extremely irregular. Generally, an appeals court can only rule based on the record--essentially, the opinion and the transcript of the lower court case. Unless it's a very clear case of factual error by the lower court, the appeals court won't accept new evidence or try to make a factual finding itself--it will instead send the case back down, with instructions to the lower court to admit new evidence and to fix whatever procedural errors it made that tainted its original findings.

Because of these circumstances, my informed legal opinion is that the appeals court pulled it out of its ass. I'm inclined to believe the drone-operator's non-peeping version of events unless it's revealed later that there is new evidence (somehow not on the record and inexplicably ignored by the lower court) that the drone operator doctored the data somehow, or that the shooter is a fae-being who is magically prevented from telling lies.

First, the idea of "meeting of the minds" is an old common law concept that strongly influences how contract law works in the U.S., but it is not used in the U.S. the way it used to be--partially because of jokers like you.

Second, the idea of "meeting of the minds" does not mean what you think it means. It implies that a valid contract requires mutual intent and understanding. There are three situations where a meeting of the minds does not occur under reasonable circumstances, and so a contract doesn't exist: 1) two guys vaguely agree to something, but their promises leave out too many specific details to be reasonably enforced, 2) two guys agree to certain terms, one of those terms is ambiguous, both guys didn't notice the ambiguity and reasonably thought they believed it meant two different, incompatible things, or 3) one guy is in a coma, or black out drunk, and the other guy puts a pen in his hand, and has him sign a contract.

No court that I know of has ever bought your whole argument that "I said all the words and performed all the actions that a reasonable person would interpret to be assent to the terms being offered in order to trick you into performing your part of the contract, but secretly I had my fingers crossed behind my back, so there was no actual contract. Haha I win!" From my own moderate sample size, I can tell you that around that point, the other side moves for a directed verdict and usually gets it. Also, once when the judge was feeling particularly grumpy, the case was referred to criminal court to determine whether any criminal fraud was committed.

I sincerely hope that you learned contract law from poorly written blog posts. If you actually paid some degree-mill to teach you what you just vomited here, I would recommend demanding a refund. Don't hold your breath, though. When they agreed to accept your tuition, promising to teach you law in exchange, they probably said "Not!" after you left the room. Which, according to you, means there wasn't actually a valid contract to begin with.

First, let's define terms. I am against people flying drones at low altitude vertically above your property. Iff this is what you mean by "close proximity," you can a) disregard the rest of my response and b) disregard your own comment, because the law already prohibits this. Yes, there's some uncertainty over precisely how high the ceiling of your airspace is, but most agree that it's more than a hundred yards or so... and in practical, trigonometric terms, being 100 yards above your property, and being 100 yards above public property adjacent to yours doesn't make a difference in terms of privacy. If, however, by "close proximity" you are arguing some sort of right to police airspace that isn't actually yours to control by any theory of property rights, I disagree with you strongly. Fourth Amendment jurisprudence shows no right to privacy from above unless you take steps to protect that privacy (by being indoors or under a canopy.) If you take steps to ensure partial outdoor privacy (such as a high fence), you only have a reasonable expectation of privacy to the extent that people can't break laws to circumvent your steps (i.e., trespass on your property to climb a nearby tree to spy on you.) The law recognizes no reasonable expectation of privacy from neighbors at a third story window, low flying planes, or surveillance satellites. As for people "parking a drone" and watching you from a position they're legally allowed to occupy, the law ALREADY enables this behavior with non-drones. The law generally allows people to walk where they want on public property and drive where they want on public roads, regardless of whether somebody feels uncomfortable about the fact that you can see who is entering and leaving their house, regardless of whether they're going somewhere quickly, taking the scenic route, or hanging out. Fourth Amendment jurisprudence agrees there is no reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to what you can see from a public space--it's why police don't need warrants to stake out a private residence in plain view. In some places there are laws that deal with extremely unreasonable behavior (anti-stalking laws.) Anti-loitering laws also allow the police to shoo someone away for being a nuisance, but these are highly limited in scope and effect. I love your signature quote: "It's a liberty issue. I'd rather be free to choose, even if I make the wrong choices." Very libertarian. My favorite is, "Rarely does good law come from somebody saying 'there oughta be a law.'" I completely understand the harm you're worried about, but before proposing a new law with no regard to individual liberties and the practicality of enforcement, you should ask yourself a few things. 1) Are there existing laws that bar the kind of harm you're concerned about? 2) Are these laws inherently ineffective, or ineffective because law enforcement and the public haven't figured out how to apply them to new circumstances or technology? 3) Can these laws made effective through minor changes to the law, or training police, or other minor fixes? 4) If after asking 1-3, you conclude you absolutely need a new law, is that law the least restrictive means to achieve your goal? Are you penalizing only people engaged causing the harm you fear, or are you trading away the freedom of an entire group of people because that's the lazy, easy way to control a small subset of them?

According to apparently half the people in this thread, you get to shoot it down the moment crosses your airspace, and loot the pizza from the crash site. According to a slightly smaller number of people, you don't even have to wait for it to get over your property, as long as it's withing "shotgun but not a sniper rifle range."

I absolutely agree with the rationale of your argument. Since in theory "profit" vs. non-profit doesn't change anything, it wouldn't seem to make sense to differentiate between the two when it comes to the law. In practice, we have many laws that regulate businesses more than similar, non-profit activities, for two reasons. 1) There is a legal theory that when someone goes into business to make profit, it's reasonable to expect them to learn regulations and engage in compliance/reporting measures that would be unreasonable to impose on the entire population. For example, licensed firearms dealers are expected to learn the background check rules and to comply with them, and to explain to customers how to comply with them during sales, but it's far less reasonable to expect everyone who ever wants to buy a gun to learn every ATF regulation, make sure they're complying with them when they purchase a gun, with zero help from the dealer, and to avoid even accidentally breaking any rules lest the ATF come knocking later. 2) In many activities, doing it for business involves doing it at a scale that is orders of magnitude higher than people doing it for fun, and involves a much greater risk or impact. It's why in many places, recreational fishermen are basically told to buy a license, throw back anything smaller than this, and don't walk away with more than this many fish in a day, while commercial operations are required to follow strict and complex quotas (sometimes changing dynamically season to season based on fishery health) and must comply with reporting and inspection requirements (rather than more or less relying on the honor system like those with recreational licenses.) Drones present a possible danger, as well as a novel and unexpected way to break existing laws, so some minimal new safety laws, as well as tweaks to old laws to account for the new technology, will probably be needed to regulate everyone. However, I wouldn't be surprised (or particularly offended) if there winds up being a second, stricter set of registration requirements or other laws specifically for drone use for profit, or for drone fleets above a certain size operated by a single entity.

The fact that you conflate Microsoft and Sony so readily (and some of your colorful choice of language) seems to show you're not entirely rational or objective on this topic. First, why do you say that Sony lobbied for the laws you're complaining about (it would help also if you articulated those laws with specificity, but then that would make your assertions falsifiable, which I imagine you don't want.) They're mostly hardware, they have no skin in the game on software protection. Also, I find it telling that so many seem to switch seamlessly back and forth between characterizing Microsoft as using their monopoly powers to coerce manufacturers into doing things that aren't in their own economic best interest, and characterizing Microsoft and Sony as voluntary co-conspirators who should thus be collectively liable for Microsoft's past misdeeds, depending on which (diametrically opposed) interpretation supports your argument at the moment.

Just curious, do you complain that you can't legally extract the written part of the book, copy it to some other format, and then sell it to a third party because you only wanted the dead tree part of the book in the first place?

Just one question: Why is this monopoly power illegal? At least in the U.S., our laws don't ban monopolies--particularly monopolies that arise because, for whatever reason, many people are buying from a particular company. Our laws ban monopolization--certain illegal steps by companies without monopoly power to acquire one by means other than winning at the free market. A merger that would give a monopoly where none existed before would be illegal. Using monopoly power in one market to establish one in another (like Microsoft did with bundling IE) might be illegal. But using your monopoly power--once you have legally earned it--is not and should not be illegal. If Microsoft wants to say, "You have three choices. 1) A terrible, non-transferable, one machine license for Windows at a decent price. 2) Paying full retail for a normal copy of Windows. 3) Buying nothing from us." that is their choice. Like I said, Microsoft tried to gain monopoly in other areas and got sanctioned for it. However, their near monopoly of the non-Apple OS market was earned by inexplicably doing a good job marketing it.