For us as Barristers, rarely does a moment go by we don't think about how the law applies
in any given situation and what we are doing yesterday was no different I was out enjoying
the sun flying my dream and lots of little questions came to mind which to cover in this
video first of all of you just joining a legal community new questions of your own don't
forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos stick around to the end when
I'm going to cover up some questions and comments that have been left in previous video first
of all going to talk about the broad spectrum of aviation and Dromore before going into
some more specific questions that many of you might have first of all of them might
be obvious and drone is defined as an unmanned flying aircraft the larger ones are known
as remotely piloted air systems unmanned aerial vehicles unmanned aerial systems all of these
things are still a drone of some sort another important definition to think about which
many of you have asked about whether a drug can carry something this will relate to the
maximum take of Max or N.this is an important measurement because it relates to the regulations
and it will be the entire mass of the aircraft as it takes off including any batteries severally
speaking aviation regulation or aviation law is split into two main categories firstly
airworthiness regulation that is to ensure that their crop is safe to use or safe to
fly secondly operational regulation which is all about pilot training licensing and
so we have airspace which is split into several classes from a to G depending on the airspace
class it will determine what level of air traffic management is required types of aircraft
and operations and it will also determine what level of training is required for the
pilot for example without going into too much detail in either of the classes taking class
a as an example it is restrictive for professional pilots flying sophisticated commercial aircraft
only with a full air traffic management system with on the other end of the spectrum in class
G this is where many drones are restricted flying 400 feet all lower aboveground looking
at how aviation law is applied there is broadly a hierarchy of three levels of regulation
firstly there is international which when trouble is too much in this video but this
is governed by the International civil aviation organisation there are regional regulators
such as Europe with the EU aviation safety agency yes this is important because this
is where many of the rules have been adopted from have national regulators for example
in the UK we honestly have the civil aviation authority and an important note that since
the U.K.'s final departure from the EU the CAA is wholly responsible for the aeronautical
regulation within the United Kingdom if you want to hear and admit more about the categories
I discussed in my previous video which I will link below but now for some general rules
and restrictions when flying drones in the United Kingdom firstly a fairly broad and
obvious one that the operator of an aircraft must take any appropriate actions to ensure
the safety of the operation next and this might apply to a specific type of flying that
you're doing that the operator is responsible for developing operational procedures adapted
to the type of operation and risk involved saw the sleep you are doing a certain type
of flying and is a high level of risk and you are the one responsible for developing
the operational procedures that flight the next one applies to the remote pilot and concern
the safety of the aircraft itself remote pilot is responsible for ensuring that the system
is in a condition to be flown safely for maintaining control of the unmanned aircraft and complying
with the manufacturers instructions and the operators procedures so you can see there
that the person actually flying the drone is responsible for each of those things so
those are worth bearing in mind again with the remote pilot it is the remote client that
is responsible to ensure that the aircraft is flown at a safe distance from people and
that it is not flown over a crowd of people against the remote pilot's responsibility
to ensure that there is a direct line of sight at all times and that the aircraft is not
flown out of sight yet must not be flown above hundred and 20 m from the closest point on
the Earth service except for certain obstacles and very important if you are within a flight
restriction zone it is a protected aerodrome with government recognition no unmanned aircraft
may be flown in these areas without permission and are related some of the questions nothing
may be dropped from a drone and nothing may be carrying that is in any way dangerous and
finally and I think this must be fairly obvious that operators of drones must not recklessly
or negligently cause or permit their aircraft to endanger any person or property as to commercial
operations before 31 December 2020 permission was necessary but this requirement has now
fallen away to add to liability there be many questions about who is liable and responsible
for damage to property or injury to persons so to answer these questions section 76 of
the civil aviation act 1982 provides for strict owner or operator liability for surface damage
and this will include injury to individuals or damage to property caused by an aircraft
and strict liability for those that are not sure is where the intent for something to
happen is not necessary the mere fact that it has happened is enough to give rise to
liability often known as a strict liability offence in the criminal world here we have
strict civil liability if you are the owner operator of an aircraft and it falls from
the sky causes damage to property or injury to persons or animal for that matter then
you will have strict civil liability under the civil aviation act that gives obvious
rise to the consideration of insurance but come back to that in the moment because sticking
with the civil liability there is an EU product liability directive which means that if the
manufacturer turns out to be responsible for a defective product and this is found to be
the cause of a crash and damage to property or injury to persons the manufacturer or the
important may well be liable and this directive was incorporated into UK law in the consumer
protection act of 1987 and for the avoidance of doubt this will continue to govern product
liability after bricks also in the event that there is an air to air collision this is not
dealt with on a strict liability basis but in this scenario they would be the finding
of fault as to who was to blame and honestly this might be very difficult with the drone
but that's the basis upon which liability would be caused there so if there is an air
to air collision and it's all recorded footage and one person is clearly responsible then
they are going to assume responsibility for the collisions are moving onto insurance as
an EU regulation that is been retained after exit the requires all commercial aircraft
operators including drones to purchase third-party liability insurance and although most leisure
drone flying would be excluded from requiring third-party liability insurance provided that
the aircraft is under 20 kg I would still recommend seeking out insurance because it
is unlikely that your home insurance is going to cover it unless you seek specific confirmation
otherwise I would seek out specific insurance for example the British model flying Association
provide insurance to its members moving on to data protection and privacy obviously most
drones have a camera these days and that one of the main purposes of having to take aerial
footage at an EU level there is no data protection law that specifically relates to drones although
the rights to privacy and data protection is part of the ECHR is for the UK is concerned
we have a retained version of GD PR and of course our own data protection act and all
of the EU case law that was current at the end of the transition period has been retained
in UK law super hobbies flyers is quite likely that the use of drone and its attached camera
will come within the household exemptions which is where the processing of any data
is purely for personal or household activity the ICO has some useful guidance document
regarding CCTV which are linked below and important to note that the ICO makes a distinction
of the use of drones between hobbyists and commercial flying is also the journalistic
exemption whereby the processing of personal data such as photographs and videos May will
be exempt if they use for journalistic publications education academic and artistic material by
way of example just before I leave this topic of data protection just a brief warning on
the tort of misuse of private information if you were flying a drone as a hobbyist in
a public place and are broadly exempt from most data protection and GDP are regulations
quite obviously if you are flying that drone to specifically capture a specific person
with a specific type of footage that you are then planning to publish to cause harm or
distress to that person this might amount to the misuse of private information and there
may still be an action against you in any event so just bear that in mind another couple
of questions that come up include whether or not it would be trespassed to fire drone
over someone else's property this week looked right back to 1815 and Pickering and Rudd
where the court held that it wasn't trespassed to fly a balloon over someone else's land
and interestingly enough that it wouldn't be trespassed to fire a bullet across someone
else's land unless the bullet landed in which case it might amount to trespass in that case
although probably a more relevant and certainly more recent case in 1978 is Burstein and sky
views this would provide reasonable authority that it is not press pass to fly a drone over
someone else's property finally one or two questions came up as to whether or not you
will be allowed to take off your drone on someone else's land now the strict position
here would be if the land belongs to somebody else then you would need permission to take
off from their land or to land on their land land there and there are various websites
that talk about things like this like the district website has a page that talks about
various parts of the Peak District owned by different individuals and strictly speaking
with the drone you should be seeking permission from the land owner though in reality as long
as you are not causing trouble it's not likely to upset anybody but again as I often say
this comes down to common sense been courteous to others and if at all possible seeking permission
and as a final final warning and breach of the air navigation order as amended would
amount to a criminal offence so please make sure you do your full research as to what
you are doing when you are flying that you're not in breach of any of these rules another
bonus session which I'm going to call questions in the comments that are doing every video
at the end of the main segment all you need to do is put your question in the comments
with hashtag blackbelt barrister and I'm going to pick some of those to do in the next video
at the end of the main segment channel members are going to come first so if you want to
make sure you that your question answered check out my channel membership or my PC on
I'm going to answer those questions first let's get into it the first question here
comes from a channel member Chris TR hi to Chris this was in response to my video should
you keep packages delivered by mistake the question was what if someone is required to
pay for a package to be returned to the sender would it be reasonable to expect someone to
pay for a package they did not order that if you didn't order something you're not going
to be required to pay anything to get it returned to the sender or the owner also on the other
hand you cannot just keep something it with reasonable steps you can determine who the
owner of the thing is all you really need to do is make it available and give them reasonable
notice and a reasonable amount of time to come and collect it from send a curry or something
like that you are not going to be required to pay anything to send this thing back if
you didn't order that's just ridiculous next we have a question from not an audit can a
shopping centre security guard use force to remove someone just for recording now shopping
centre security guard presuming that the shopping centre is a privately owned establishment
the security guard is going to be employed buying the shopping centre and if they ask
you to leave let's say for breaking one of their rules Sanchez: if I ask you to leave
the breaking one of the rules then it becomes a private property and you become a trespasser
if you continue to record and you refuse to leave they can then use reasonable force to
escort you off the premises but it must be reasonable forced to check out my trespassed
videos for reasonable force in removing someone as a trespasser likewise in Alex Freeman's
question could she forcefully remove Charlie this was in my press pass video a little while
ago and the answer is yes but again with reasonable force you can use reasonable force to remove
the trespasser from your premises next question is from Lee Winters in my can you take photographs
in public video question was what about stalking now I think I briefly address this in the
video but just in case I didn't obviously if you are stalking somebody and harassing
somebody that's going to engage different sets of laws not just your general freedom
to take photographs and video in public as I said in the video there are very few restrictions
on taking photographs and videos in public but if you are stalking somebody or harassing
somebody that's going to engage different laws and of course that's going to be wrong
in response to my drone law UK part one video break Amalek asked the question so does this
mean that any AI piloted drones or any delivery drones are effectively banned in the UK broadly
speaking no AI and delivery drones are going to be a sophisticated level of flight within
the UK they are going to require specific permissions licences insurances and all those
sorts of things but they're not going to be out right band that's not the intention of
the law the intention is to categorise the level of risks and then determine what levels
of training and licensing permits and all of all those kinds of things are required
and the question on taking photographs in public runs with the cows asks returning to
the video traffic incident scenario how can taking photos or video prevent a police investigation
so to explain this a little bit further if the police got a serious incident that they
are examining or forensically investigating if you are taking photographs or videos of
anything like this there is the potential that is going to affect that police investigation
there is the potential that it might affect any legal proceedings that follow such as
if it hits the mainstream media might end up affecting the jury or it may just generally
affect the police in their investigations on what's going on it may alert various criminal
groups for example as to what's happening in the area who was there all of these kinds
of things so there will be a provision in law that allows the police to prevent you
from photographing and filming certain incidents given appropriate authorisation question about
the coded 19 vaccines and fines and so on from Annabel Rankin question Reid could you
tell me please if EU law allows members to discriminate against people who do not have
vaccines and the question goes up and broadly speaking no discrimination has to be on a
protected characteristic so it could be something like age gender sex race religion all of those
kind of things disability obviously so if you have a specific reason that is linked
to a protected characteristic and that's the reason you haven't had the vaccine and you
have been discriminated against and it is linked in that way it could amount to discrimination
but they are not allowed to discriminate against you for one of those protected characteristics
simply refusing to take the vaccine is not a protected characteristic in and of itself
it could be if you haven't had it because you are not in an age group that has been
designated to have the vaccine and let's say you've been dismissed from your employment
because you have had it but you are eligible to have it then you could be hypothetically
speaking been treated differently because of your age group then someone else who has
not been dismissed but they've only had their vaccine because they are a major group that
has had the vaccine so I hope that makes sense but it has to come back to something where
discrimination has been broadly inhibited such as a protected characteristic question
on UK knife law from X to JD do you need a genuine reason to carry a folding knife under
3 inches now just to be clear a folding life that does not lock that comes within the definition
of a falling pocketknife which includes being no more than 3 inches unless you remain restricted
area like an airport of school court or places like that then generally speaking know you
don't need a genuine good reason to carry such a thing it is an exemption which means
this is not one of the things that is restricted under the law but as I said there are restricted
areas that you just simply won't get away with carrying it at all but if you're just
walking about the streets in your everyday business and you've got a folding pocket knife
comes within that exemption you will need a good reason that the law requires anything
that doesn't fall within that exemption another question about knives from Peter Stubbs says
I have a wooden letter opener knife and there is no metal so it's classes assist stealth
knife or is it completely illegal to own well I think the clue is in the wording that you've
used it a letter opener it is a tall with a function it's designed to do something it
is not designed as a knife is designed as a letter openers for example there are metal
letter openers is just so happens that yours is made of wood so it wouldn't be illegal
to own however if it was very sharp when you are carrying it in a public place it may well
be considered either or both and a rated article or an offensive weapon defensive weapon might
depend on your intent to carry it for example if you're carrying it for self defence then
you are carrying it as an offensive weapon if it is a very sharp thing then it could
be considered a bladed article which doesn't come within the exemptions and again you would
have to provide a good reason for carrying it with you I hope you enjoy that Q&A session
let me know in the comments if you want me to do more of these Q&A's drop your questions
and comments in the box with hashtag blackbelt barrister so that I know you picked up this
message and I will pick up on your questions in the next video channel members come first
so check out channel membership or patron membership and those will come first thanks
for watching season