States Pass Drone Laws in Droves

Three years after it was tasked with de­vel­op­ing a set of rules for com­mer­cial drone op­er­at­ors, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment still has not fi­nal­ized drone reg­u­la­tions, in­stead dol­ing out more than 1,000 ex­emp­tions to al­low busi­nesses to fly drones in the mean­time.

Tired of wait­ing on Wash­ing­ton, states are mov­ing to de­vel­op their own drone rules. But many of the laws that states are pro­pos­ing and passing may end up con­flict­ing with what the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment even­tu­ally comes up with.

Ac­cord­ing to the Na­tion­al Con­fer­ence of State Le­gis­latures, the past two years have seen 26 states pass le­gis­la­tion con­cern­ing drones. The laws range widely in their treat­ment of drones, from the mildly lim­it­ing to the ex­tremely re­strict­ive.

On one end of the spec­trum is Cali­for­nia, a state of­ten at the van­guard of de­vel­op­ing civil-liber­ties and con­sumer-pro­tec­tion rules. Cali­for­nia’s state le­gis­lature last week sent a bill to the gov­ernor that would make it il­leg­al to fly a drone with­in 350 feet of the ground over private prop­erty without con­sent, a rule op­posed by tech­no­logy com­pan­ies such as Amazon and Google, which have plans for de­liv­er­ing goods and In­ter­net ac­cess by drone.

But most of the state-passed drone laws to date have been less re­strict­ive. Some states look­ing to cre­ate pri­vacy safe­guards have taken smal­ler steps to­ward fight­ing drone-equipped peep­ing Toms. Oth­er states tar­get spe­cif­ic in­dus­tries or use-cases: Louisi­ana’s drone law con­cerns ag­ri­cul­ture, while Ten­ness­ee’s gov­erns drone flights over pris­ons. And a hand­ful of states have passed le­gis­la­tion to out­law us­ing drones for hunt­ing or in­ter­fer­ing with hunters.

The patch­work of drone laws makes com­mer­cial users nervous.

“The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment needs a frame­work that al­lows ro­bust in­nov­a­tion and re­search. If loc­al law­makers move first and cre­ate ar­ti­fi­cial stat­utory re­stric­tions, ill-con­sidered laws like the Cali­for­nia bill may drive jobs and in­nov­a­tion over the bor­der and over­seas,” said Gary Sha­piro, CEO of the Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics As­so­ci­ation, which rep­res­ents thou­sands of tech com­pan­ies.

Hope­ful com­mer­cial drone users such as Amazon have also railed against the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment for mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for them to de­vel­op and test drone sys­tems in the United States. Earli­er this year, The Guard­i­an re­por­ted on a secret Amazon drone-test­ing site in Canada that the com­pany turned to for lack of op­por­tun­ity at home.

As the pro­lif­er­a­tion of drones con­tin­ues to ac­cel­er­ate this year, al­most every state has con­sidered le­gis­la­tion to gov­ern how they can be used, wheth­er by law en­force­ment, busi­nesses, or the pub­lic. Forty-five states have con­sidered more than 150 drone-re­lated bills in 2015, ac­cord­ing to data from the Na­tion­al Con­fer­ence of State Le­gis­latures.

Mean­while, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is in the midst of par­al­lel pro­cesses to come up with na­tion­al drone reg­u­la­tions.

The main over­seer of the na­tion’s air­space, the Fed­er­al Avi­ation Ad­min­is­tra­tion, is in charge of study­ing safety as­pects of com­mer­cial drone flights and is fi­nal­iz­ing a set of safety rules for com­mer­cial users. A draft of its pro­posed rules was an­nounced in Feb­ru­ary, and FAA of­fi­cials have said they ex­pect to be fin­ished by mid-2016.

But the FAA says its man­date stops at safety and se­cur­ity. It claims pri­vacy is­sues, which have dogged the idea of wide­spread drone flights, re­main the pur­view of the Na­tion­al Tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions and In­form­a­tion Ad­min­is­tra­tion, an agency in the Com­merce De­part­ment.

NTIA re­cently began a series of meet­ings that will bring to­geth­er stake­hold­ers in fed­er­al drone rule­mak­ing to settle on vol­un­tary drone pri­vacy guidelines. But a pri­vacy ad­vocacy or­gan­iz­a­tion filed suit against the FAA soon after the agency an­nounced its safety rules, ar­guing that the FAA’s man­date to come up with a “com­pre­hens­ive” set of drone reg­u­la­tions re­quires it to draw up pri­vacy reg­u­la­tions as well.

Some mem­bers of Con­gress have also wandered in­to the fray, with pro­pos­als to re­strict where drones can fly for safety reas­ons, re­quire geofen­cing tech­no­logy to keep drones away from sens­it­ive sites like air­ports, and even tem­por­ar­ily cre­ate a full set of rules for drones that would gov­ern their use un­til fed­er­al agen­cies fi­nal­ize their reg­u­la­tions.

Re­cent data from the FAA that re­vealed a grow­ing num­ber of “close calls” between drones and com­mer­cial air­liners has ad­ded to the ur­gency of law­makers in state­houses and in Wash­ing­ton. Ac­cord­ing to the agency, there have been nearly 700 pi­lot sight­ings of drones so far this year, about three times the total num­ber of sight­ings in 2014.