Man Faces Felony for Using a Drone to Film Outside a Hospital Window
Ron Czapala
Posts: 2,418
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/man-faces-felony-for-using-a-drone-to-film-outside-a-92057392569.html
In the domestic drone debate, critics have argued that personal drones will usher in an era of rampant DIY surveillance, with cameras in the sky everywhere you turn. Proponents of that view have more ammunition this week, as an upstate New York man was arrested and faces felony charges for allegedly using a drone to film outside a medical exam room.
David Beesmer, 49, flew a drone within 15 feet of a hospital window where patients were being examined...
In the domestic drone debate, critics have argued that personal drones will usher in an era of rampant DIY surveillance, with cameras in the sky everywhere you turn. Proponents of that view have more ammunition this week, as an upstate New York man was arrested and faces felony charges for allegedly using a drone to film outside a medical exam room.
David Beesmer, 49, flew a drone within 15 feet of a hospital window where patients were being examined...
Comments
You would think someone 49 would have more sense.
Like they say, "There's no cure for stupid!"...
This guy is in for a serious ride ahead.
Wow.. So stupid..
In short using a tool to spy versus crawling up in person and watching them is the same in the eyes of the law.
Droners need to exercise restraint, they need to understand that a drone isn't a license to spy on people in their backyards, office buildings or buzz police choppers. People don't like being watched, there already have been cases of drones being shot, smashed and the operators slapped around and generally for good reason.
Actually that depends on where you live - most states only require "one party notification" so if you are one of the participants, it may be legal
See: http://www.callcorder.com/phone-recording-law-america.htm
I think we agree more than disagree, but I definitely don't believe my thinking is bad in any way. My intention was to state the relevance of the "drone" to the severity level implied by the crime. If this same person was to tie a camera to a bunch of helium ballons and float it up to do the same thing, I doubt it would be getting media attention such as this. However, since he used a drone and drones are a hot topic for media, it is plastered everywhere. The crime is the crime irregardless as you say, but this article implies severity simply because a drone was involved. That won't fly in a court of law as justification for a greater sentence. (no pun intended)
Just curious as to the Law in New York. If it is like WA. then the case will go nowhere.
Anyway one thing I read is that no video (audio) recording can be made in areas where someone would normally expect privacy. Like a bathroom or bedroom. (Or in the above case, a hospital examining room.) And doing so is against the law.
The audio recordings have different laws from video recordings. Be aware of that. And pretty much you can do audio recordings so long as you notify people they are being recorded. Thus the "this call being recorded" messages when you call a business. And video seems fair game in public places and non-expectation of privacy areas of private property/businesses.
In my case, it is my understanding I can record video and audio outside my home so long as I have signs posted all around saying "video and audio surveillance". And I don't think I would need any signs if video only.
Note: Nothing is "for sure" with laws. And various states have different laws. One good source for this information is a TV news site - they are always "testing the waters" with various TV programs...
Reporter's Recording Guide...
http://www.rcfp.org/rcfp/orders/docs/RECORDING.pdf
Is not "media hype" a redundancy? You know like 'shyster lawyer', 'corrupt politician' and 'bureaucratic ineptitude'.
I know it is not good form to correct spelling or grammar but this one just would not let me pass it by.
Forgive me please.
Tim
(Edited to cover my lack of proof reading skills.)
You are not making any spelling or grammatical corrections.
You might have a point if it were true that there were no honest lawyers (I have met at least one!), no straight politicians, and no inept bureaucrats. Or in this case media that does not "hype".
Given that there are such things there is not a problem with all this.
Besides "media hype" is in such common usage one has no legs to stand on when trying to find any grammatical error in it.
It's not like he'd said "PIN number", "LCD display", or "LED diode". But even those usages are so common it's not worth hassling over.
We are most fortunate in that unlike some we do not have language police<g>.
PM me if you did not catch my drift on that.
Sorry if I missed some joke their about the language police. I still don't see it if there was one.
Just recently I was watching a lecture on YouTube about this topic by a renowned linguistics professor.
He basically said:
A lot of the language style and grammar rules laid down style guides, as created by newspapers for their journalists, or for the general public were basically often very wrong. They did not accord with the way most people speak or write, or any well known and respected books in recent history or indeed the history of the English language at all.
Further, the way English is often taught in school is similarly wrong. He gave some amusing examples of grammar tests used in examinations, multiple choice, for which there was no correct answer or nobody could figure out what the question meant anyway.
This made me feel much better. Turns out that when my mind rejected all efforts by my English teachers at school it was not my fault!
Think global regarding language police.
English in school was always my toughest subject. Unlike math and science English gave you a rule and then fourty-eleven exceptions. Therefore I took speech and journalism and became editor of my HS newspaper that was printed on newsprint with pictures. The mechanic in me loved the linotype.
The English language is a mess of stuff from all around, so called "Indo-European" I think they call it. It changes all the time. But if you are linguist studying these things you find that it does have persistent rules of usage despite the massive changes that occur in spelling, vocabulary and so on. Despite the lack of "style guides" and grammar books.
Then you find that a lot of the current style guides and grammar education is totally at odds with historical precedent. Hence the logical disconnect and pain kids feel in school English classes. The teaching is just wrong!
If you have a free hour, Prof. Nikolas Gisborne's brilliant lecture on this, "What's Grammar For?", is here http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myvD96EQx9s
There is a lot of linguistic nerd babble in then to get through though. I think every school kid should see this video so that they know what they are up against and can tell their English teachers to stick it, inteligently:)
Personally I feel it is best the "listener" understand what you are saying, then you are communicating! (Speak in terms and language the listener will understand.)
Terminology is created by agreement.
Attempts to standardize may never go as far as hoped for.
I have been teaching English as a second language for over 19 years. And to do it well has been an extremely interesting journey. One day I might even understand Australians. Meanwhile, I am actually doing quite well with watching Sponge Bob Square Pants in Chinese.
What does this all have to do with peeping in hospital windows?
Grammar first evolved to teach Latin ( a dead language) to people attending higher education of the day.
All languages change over time, not just English.
You cant' have communications without different symbols, the ordering and arrangement of those symbols will determine the meaning of what you are trying to say. That is grammar.
You can imagine that at the dawn of human verbal language we had simple sounds, say shriek and grunt. "Shriek grunt" might have meant "good". "Grunt shriek" might have meant bad. Or whatever. This has evolved in many ways over the millenia and created the different languages we have today. So we now have "The cat sat on the mat" having a different meaning to "The mat sat on the cat". In other languages, like Finnish things can be "backwards", "The cup is table on" rather than "The cup is on the table" (Finns please excuse my crude explanation here).
In computer programming we also have grammar, syntax as they say. Like Finnish, Forth is backwards compared to many others.
Oh yeah, as long as there is someone understands it no language is "dead". I can listen to the news on the radio every morning in Latin! The Welsh language has had a massive revival in my lifetime. As a kid very few spoke Welsh, now it is a very big thing. There are many other examples.
I'm failing to really hard to relate all this to drones and hospitals.
So few people ever seem to get that concept. Apply the law and punish the people who do illegal things. Would it be any different if he'd used an extension pole or setup a telescope on a garage roof? All the reflexive nannies that have no answer but "Ban" and "New regulations needed" just drive me to insanity. If the measure of what activity I'm allowed to do is tied to the first #$%##*le who abuses it then there is nothing left because the world is filled with #$%##*les and will always be so.
Yeah, it would be different. The news/media wouldn't get the amount of traffic needed to facilitate publishing it. "Extension Pole" vs "Drone". This is mostly because, I'm sure you already know, the buzzword "drone" literally drives advertising revenue into their pockets. I can't even...