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The U.S. Department of Transportation is set to announce plans to require registration for every drone sold:
Have a drone? You're going to have to register it with the U.S. Department of Transportation, according to NBC News.
The federal government will announce a plan within days that will require anyone who buys a drone to register it with the Department of Transportation, NBC reported Friday evening.
A Department of Transportation spokesperson told MarketWatch that U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Administrator Michael Huerta of the Federal Aviation Administration will release more details on Monday at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time.
"The hobbyist drone community has self-regulated itself for decades," said Lisa Ellman, co-chair of the unmanned aircraft systems practice at Hogan Lovells, a New York–based law firm. "But with the technology getting so cheap and improving so much, we have more and more drones."
FAA official Rich Swayze said last month that the agency expects that a million drones could be sold this holiday season.
"A lot of people are buying them and thinking they are toys," Ellman said. "They are not toys."
Florida lawyer Jonathan Rupprecht, author of a book on drone law, said he believes any plan centered around drone registration is a necessary first step toward regulating drones but is curious how the regulation will play out and whether the rule will apply to hobbyists with small drones.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday October 20 2015, @08:03PM
I'll be surprised if they have 5% of the budget required to police people. It's easy to police airplanes, even down to the hobbyist stuff, when the hobby is priced well outside of the reach of your standard non-living slave wage.
I sincerely fail to see how they will be able to regulate something when software has removed nearly all requirements for skill, and the costs are pushed low enough for use by the unwashed masses. Who will be watching this new low airspace, and with what equipment, and with what personnel? There seems to be this idea that we can just do anything, and that we are all powerful. We're not, and I really don't think we're prepared for the additional regulatory burden of mass policing three dimensional airspace when we have budgetary issues policing the two dimensional ground with vehicles.
I can already see how to build a drone with spare parts, a software repository, and a throw-away smart phone. It's easily foreseeable that a good percentage of drone flights, when they become the new normal, will be unregistered illegal smuggling of contraband. The government does such a swell job each day of completely stopping all contraband with it's multi-billion dollar War On Drugs, I can only imagine the hilarity of their impotent and futile War On Drones.
I'm actually far more interested in the government agreeing that I can shoot down any trespassing drone over my property. That's the new regulations in the future. Your $1,000 toy being ripped to shreds by a somebody's anti-air tech they built from a Ted Talk. All I need to do is watch out for Amazon's drones if I ever order anything for Amazon, otherwise I'll just start shooting them down. That will be far more effective than a pathetic phone call to the police, waiting a few hours for the police to show, and then watching them go through their training on triangulating a drone's control signals.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.