Originally published at: "Ancient lights" protect the right to light - Boing Boing
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An interesting side-effect of the rights:
(TLDW: guy buys house, finds structure blocking light into his windows, built on neighbor’s land. The structure had been there for many decades, with the sole purpose of blocking light into the house’s windows. The idea being that if the neighbor ever decided to develop that parcel of land, they could build right up to the property line and block the house’s light, with no right to complain because he’d never had “ancient lights” - because they were deliberately blocked. So because the right existed, that house was unnecessarily deprived of light on one side for a century before anything ever got built.)
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I assume the right is a common law one in origin in the UK too. Sounds like an easement to me.
We don’t have it in Ireland.
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I wonder if the question of what “natural” means has been aggressively litigated yet.
It obviously excludes just gluing an LED street lamp assembly to the side of your building and telling the neighbors to suck it up; but would something like a collector on the roof of the offending building feeding into a lightguide system with outputs aimed at the overshadowed ones count?
Without reading the legislation which codified the common law right: no.
Not a chance.
I’m familiar with the Japanese application of this concept. The reason so many suburban houses in Japan have somewhat convoluted plans, is to make them wedge into already partly built up areas without compromising the light to the pre-existing neighbouring buildings.
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