A bill aimed at preventing peeping Toms from using flying toys to peer on others will be dropped and replaced with a bill amending the state's anti-voyeurism laws, the sponsor said Thursday.
Amending those laws will achieve the same ends as House Bill 1079, said sponsor Rep. Justin Harris, R-West Fork. Harris said he introduced House Bill 1079 after watching what a toy he bought for his son at Christmas could do. The tiny helicopter came with a camera that could transmit images to a monitor or hand-held device and be recorded.
"Someone older who could handle the technology could look into somebody's backyard or window without them even knowing it and record video," Harris said earlier this week.
But the bill ran into opposition from both businesses and hobbyists. Harris met with business owners and with representatives of the Mid-Arkansas Radio Control Society, whose members often attach cameras to their flying model airplanes. That meeting was at the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon.
"In my business, I often take pictures or video of a piece of property from an angle, using an unmanned vehicle that will have to fly over someone else's property to get the right image," said Robert Davis of Little Rock, owner of Arkansas Aerials.
Under House Bill 1079, as it was worded, that would be illegal. The bill would have forbidden taking video or pictures by drones while flying over private property without the property owner's permission. Strictly defined, this wouldn't have allowed Davis' business to take images of a client's property without also getting permission from adjoining property owners, even if all the images taken were of his client's property, he said.
Pilots of radio-controlled aircraft like to put video cameras on their planes, often from the vantage point the pilot of a full-sized aircraft would have from the cockpit, said Randy Womack, president of the radio control society. It wouldn't be possible to put a camera on such a craft and avoid taking some video of the property of others, he said.
Both Davis and Womack said they understood what Harris wanted to do and why, but the issue had a long history of defying an easy solution. The Federal Aviation Administration "has been trying to write a rule on this since at least 2006," Davis said.
Harris called the state Attorney General's office after the meeting Wednesday, he said. The office will help him draft amendments to the existing laws.
"As technology changes, the laws have to keep up," Harris said.
NW News on 01/31/2015