A lot of the arguments being made in this thread are relevant to the general topic of privacy and personal property laws as applied to flying RC craft, but they miss the facts of this specific case, which are:
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The pilot was flying over his friend’s property at the time that the craft was shot, as evidenced by the fact that he was able to recover the craft. If he had been flying over the shooter’s property, the craft would have fallen on the shooter’s property.
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The pilot had his friend’s express permission to record.
Even in some very conservative interpretations of privacy laws, this pilot was 100% in the right.
What if the pilot had overflown the neighbor’s airspace? The only relevant court case in the U.S. is US v. Causby. The Supreme Court wrote that:
A landowner “owns at least as much of the space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land,” and invasions of that airspace “are in the same category as invasions of the surface.”
By this standard, an RC craft flying at 30 meters over a two-story home could be argued not to be in violation of the owner’s airspace, since the craft is above the height that the owner can occupy or is using in connection with the land.
If we set aside that argument and stipulate that a privacy violation has occurred, the next question becomes whether it was legally justified to destroy the RC craft with a shotgun. If a photographer trespasses on private property in order to take photographs of a celebrity, and the celebrity responds by detaining the photographer and smashing the camera, is that action legally justified? I think not. If the operator of the craft is violating a law by flying the craft in an unauthorized or unsafe manner, or by recording illegally, the right response is to document the action and notify the police or file a civil law suit.
Finally, I would like to point out that the question of whether the camera was “aimed at his house or his activities” is moot. I have every legal right to stand on the sidewalk and take video of your house, your yard, etc… anything I can see from an area where I have a right to be, I can record. Therefore, if I have a legal right to use the airspace 50 feet above the sidewalk in front of your house, I also have a legal right to record what’s going on in your back yard from that vantage point. This is exactly how paparazzi with telephoto lenses get photos of celebrities by their pools. We may not like it, but that’s how the law is written and interpreted in the United States as of now.
