Whether your neighbor, the cops and other Big Brother types can use drones to spy on you as you go about your day-to-day activities may depend on how a judge feels about a few dead chickens in North Carolina and an ancient English law.

The case involves a shotgun-toting Kentuckian who blasted a camera-equipped drone out of the air when it entered his airspace last summer. Though the stuff of late-night TV jokes, it's a serious case that may change the rules for private property ownership and personal privacy.

It involves a Hillview, Ky., man who last summer shot a drone out of the air as it flew over his Bullitt County home.

It seems a bit reminiscent of a time not so long ago when a good many farm folks kept a shotgun or .22 rifle leaning in a corner just inside the backdoor in case a pesky chicken hawk were to come along looking for a free meal among the laying stock.

That in a sense is what William Merideth did last summer when he used a shotgun to blast a recreational drone equipped with a remote camera that he said was hovering over his and his neighbors' properties and lingering over his daughter who was sunbathing in his backyard.

The owner of the drone took umbrage and called police who charged Merideth with criminal mischief. A Bullitt County judge dismissed the charges saying the drone was trespassing and that it represented an invasion of privacy. The homeowner had a right to shoot it down, the judge ruled.

Far from satisfied with that ruling, the owner of the drone last month filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Louisville seeking a clarification of rights for drone fliers as well as $1,500 for damages to his aircraft.

How it goes will hinge in part upon a modern-day interpretation of an old English legal concept.

In the long ago, when a lot of things we take for granted today hadn't been thought of yet, English law established a precedent for what a landowner could claim as his. Basically, the ruling was that if one owned a parcel of ground, he owned everything from heaven to hell as it related to that parcel. That is he owned everything in the ground below it and everything in the air above it.

That concept didn't trigger a lot of litigation or thought until airplanes were invented and began flying over peoples' properties.

By 1938, U.S. Congress was involved and passed a law saying everything above 500 feet was public airspace and in the public domain, like a highway on the ground.

This, by the way, is what enables law enforcement officers to fly over private property and look for illegal activity, such as growing marijuana, without a search warrant. The courts have held that everyone has the privilege of flying over a person's property at 500 feet and if illegal activity is visible from that 'public' space it's no different from it's being spotted by person while driving along a surface highway.

The Civil Aeronautic Act basically said, though, planes couldn't fly lower than 500 feet and by default seemed to leave the landowner in possession of airspace from the ground up to that level.

That enabled a North Carolina chicken grower to challenge the authority of Army planes to fly lower over his property during World War II. Their noise scared his chickens to the point he could no longer operate a chicken farm, and he sued the government for damages.

The Supreme Court sided with him, and said the Army planes swooping over his property at a height of only 83 feet were just too low. Justice William Douglas wrote for the court that a landowner owned as much of the airspace below 500 feet as he could use in connection with the land and that trespass into that space was the same as trespass on the surface.

More recently, though, with the rising popularity of drones and the potential for conflict such as the one in Kentucky, the Federal Aviation Administration has attempted to assert authority over all airspace, prompting some suggest you couldn't even launch a paper airplane without filing a flight plan with the FAA.

The current lawsuit asks the federal court to resolve 'the boundaries of the airspace surrounding real property, the reasonable expectation of privacy as viewed from the air and the right to damage or destroy an aircraft in-flight, in relation to the exclusive federal regulation and protection of air safety, air navigation, and control over the national airspace.'

Until that happens, drone fliers will be well advised to keep a sharp eye for shotgun-toting homeowners.

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