Last Friday, I presented a paper (co-authored with Walter Block) at the 49th Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space at the International Astronautical Conference in Valencia, Spain.
Advertising Age, the industry bellwether, interviewed me regarding that paper, and an article related to the paper and the interview has now appeared in the latest issue.
Our topic: space billboards.
The technology for space billboards exists: under a proposal an entrepreneur invented several years ago, mile-wide mylar billboards would circle the globe in low orbit, so that people could see them from the ground with the naked eye. As you might imagine, environmentalists vehemently opposed this, led by such groups as the gloomily monikered International Dark Sky Association.
But what’s so wrong with space billboards? Why is the default “natural” view of the sky so preferable to a sky with some billboards in it? If the moon naturally, coincidentally had a Pizza Hut logo on it instead of a “man in the moon” face, environmentalists would clamor to preserve it. Why are designs that are an accident of nature so preferable to advertisements which are, after all, designed specifically to please humans so they’ll buy things? Of course, if so many people hate the idea of space billboards so much, for whatever subjective reasons they may have, then the billboards might be a bad idea and might never come about. After all, the entrepreneur’s plan a few years ago failed when no companies were willing to pay what it would have cost to advertise on them ($15 to $30 million). Since then, Congress has stepped in and both banned the billboards and requested the president to negotiate treaties to stop other countries from allowing them. We say, lift the ban and let the market decide.
Our paper considers all this and more. We can’t put it online until it is published in a book as part of the Colloquium’s proceedings. In the meantime, what do you think?
UPDATE: Here’s a link to the paper: In Defense of Advertising in Space.
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Whether you like the billboard or not is irrelevant. The question is will the billboard invade people’s property? Can you block out someone’s sky for your ads?
No one can own the sky. The sky is not a tangible object, but a line of sight. And I take it that no one can own an orbital path around the Earth. So a billboard 300 km away from your property is out of your control.
Of course you can own an orbital path, if you were using it first. It’s not matter that is owned, but a specific use of space. When you own a house you don’t just own wood and concrete, you own the space of the house, the air and the light it receives, the sounds, etc. The sky is one aspect of that.
Light isn’t exactly analogous, but it shares many characteristics with other fugitive resources, like water. And, as anyone who has spent even a few minutes researching water rights knows, there’s no easy answer to the question.
However, the answer that seems most in line with homesteaded property rights is that every property that currently receives sunlight has homesteaded that “access” right. As such, your billboard company would need to buy that right from every property the shadow from that billboard would impinge.
As urbanitect states, it has nothing to do with liking the billboard itself. The question is whether the billboard interferes with an established property right. To me, the answer is yes.
Are space billboards really any different than the banners pulled behind planes?
I really know nothing about this technology, are there any links to the company? I guess I find it hard to beleive that it would actually be miles upon miles of physical banner in the sky. Wouldn’t some form of projection work better? In this case wouldn’t the ideal market for placing such ads be in the midst of unsighlty locations. Like New York looking at New Jersey, or something similar?
The proposed billboards would be made of mylar and 1km x 1km. Someone else has recently announced the invention of a projection technology using mirrors, but I don’t know how serious that is. The point about banners behind planes is a good one — we make it in the paper.
I have to admit to having some sympathy with the Dark Sky Association and astronomers in general who pine for the days when you could look up and see the Milky Way without having to drive off to the middle of nowhere, or to be able to use a telescope to see some deep sky objects that are not washed out by the urban sky glow.
Is it possible for someone to homestead an unobstructed view of the sky, or to keep others nearby from shining light up into the sky? I think some of the big observatories have agreements (official or unofficial, I don’t know) to keep lights shielded so they can do their work. If the observatory got there first, and viewing the dark sky has some economic value, can it be considered property trespass if someone else comes later and interferes with that?
I think part of the Dark Sky Association’s strategy is to convince property owners that it is in their own interest to use light fixtures that keep the light towards the ground because it is more efficient and reduces glare. At least this seems like a cooperative rather than coercive strategy to let everyone win. It’s a rather big uphill battle though.
I suppose you could stick a billboard in space. I don’t think you could complain, however, when I use a high power ground based laser to destroy it. That technology exists, by the way. The Chinese are using it, not to destroy, but to render inoperable American spy satellites.
So go ahead. Put up a billboard. Just don’t count on it being there more than an hour or so.
As an analogy, consider OwnerA of a square parcel of land. If the owners of the parcels to the North, South, East, and West of OwnerA’s land each erected one hundred foot high billboards which completely surrounded OwnerA’s land, then would they violate any of OwnerA’s property rights?
“The Chinese are using it, not to destroy, but to render inoperable American spy satellites.”
“The Attempted Takeover of Unocal by Chinese CNOOC Wasn’t About Oil – it was about rare earths. When Frank Gaffney, Jr., the CEO of the Center for Security Policy, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on 13 July 2005 he spoke of the danger of the People’s Republic of China acquiring Unocal through CNOOC. His chief concern was not that China would control the oil involved in the potential transaction – it was that “The Unocal-owned Molycorp mine in Mountain Pass, California is America’s only indigenous source of rare earth minerals known as lanthanides, including neodymium.†Neodymium-iron-boron magnets are used for making missiles and smart bombs.”
Currently the US imports 100% of its rare earth resources (95% from China) and has no stockpile.
http://theanchorhouse.com/2006/10/10/rare-earth-may-be-chinas-checkmate/
should be on a space billboard~
Can I shoot it down for trespassing on my line of sight?
Against commercial billboards in the sky a consumers’ boycott is preferable to using ground based lasers to shoot them down. However, the laser threat should not be taken lightly by would-be advertisers: any place on Earth will do and the chances of successfully enforcing the prohibition of such an act of destruction is virtually nil. Who will be liable for the space débris?
Of course, one day commercial billboards; the next day political billboards.
If the idea is economically viable, then how many of such billboards over the relatively few degrees altitutes where most large congregations of consumers and voters live, will it take to make advertising in space a live political issue in any case?
I believe the common law holding is that you own your property from the center of the earth (where it abuts the “bottom” boundary of another’s property) to as far up as you can go. Otherwise, I could buy all the land around you and erect a dome over your property.
It is a policy question as to what we are going to grant an easement for. The buzz of an airplane and its flight over my airspace is unquestionably a trespass. But the benefits of allowing the trespass have been deemed to outweigh the costs of enforcing my rights in that 150′ x 150′ column of air above my property.
And here’s another thought. If we’re going to allow billboards in space, should a few deviants not offended by sample photos from AnythingGoes.com be allowed to broadcast this message where everybody who looks at the sky can see it? Why not? All the prudes out there will just have to pay us deviants not to exercise our property rights, and the starting bid is $10 million.
Hi Austrian readers,
If we imagine a flat, translucid object measuring ca. one square mile, floating – say – 2 kilometers or 6,000 feet above ground level, the visual effect would be similar to a small-sized cloud passing by (I suppose the thing wouldn’t be kept statically located but slowly changing its position along a pre-set path).
Apart from the individual aesthetic perception of this “orbiting ad”, which could be so objectionable as any other form of “visual pollution” already in use, I imagine no further practical consequences would derive there from, that could be viewed as violation of property rights, for instance, projecting a shadow that could impair natural lighting or anything that serious.
Perhaps an issue would arise regarding interference with low altitude flights (helicopters etc.), thus restrictions should be created to protect flight paths.
Further comments are welcome.
Regards from Rio/ Brazil.
I find the idea to be possibly atrocious, depending on where executed.
This summer, me and my girlfriend went to the Outer Banks, NC. Taking a vacation from our vacation, we camped out on Orcacoke Island in total isolation (there are dunes and beaches there that are virtually abandoned). It was wonderful. The stars were brilliantly visible, and we could easily see the milky way. Now, when I’m on this vacation, I don’t want some God-awful pornography ad, or Coca-Cola ad, or whatever, flying across the night sky.
The ad coleum view of homesteading is fallicious and anti-libertarian. We do not own a cone of space to the center of the Earth and extending out into the heavens. The concept doesn’t even make sense extending into the heavens, as they are constantly shifting (or rather, we are).
That said, I still find the idea of space-billboards — depending on where they are — atrocious. Then again, it depends on where they are. Maybe in NYC, ok. Hell, maybe someone could figure out a way to make it into a cultural thing (e.g., have a movie playing from space). Or giant space-art. Who knows.
But I think in some areas, people want to observe the natural beauty of the sky. I think that private defense agencies — through numerous mutually webbed agreements — could allow for this. However, Walter Block’s argument on interference with one’s property use might also apply. Although I only own the property I homestead, you can’t tunnel so close under my property that it causes my house to collapse. Nor can you build a giant tent over my property blocking out the sunlight. Maybe to some extent, the same thing holds for space-billboards.
David,
“I think that private defense agencies — through numerous mutually webbed agreements — could allow for this.”
I suppose they could. But even the PDA’s web of agreements and their attendant lawyers and arbitrators and rulings would have to rest ultimately on the ability of an aggrieved party to enforce the covenants against malefactors. And if the malefactor can just hire a more heavily armed PDA, then the agreements are just paper. And rather than everyone haul around their individual 10,000-page contracts with the rest of the world, you can just set up a community with a central repository of the covenants that are deemed to apply to everyone in the community. And again, since the covenants are just hortatory so long as a community member can hire a more heavily armed PDA if he wants to break the rules, the members will insist that one PDA have the monopoly on enforcement. Tell me again what advantage anarcho-capitalism has over feudalism?
To address another of your points, the movement of space is no obstacle so long as the property is defined geocentrically. This is already done to define property in other dynamic mediums such as waterways.
For reasons not entirely clear in my cloudy head, this debate reminds me of debate with radiowaves, albeit we are dealing with different senses and different ways of ignoring an advertiser’s use of the airways. What was solution to airwave problem? ( I mean, besides having it nationalized by feds and auctioned off to evil commie broadcasting networks.)
I just think it would be a really bad marketing idea. I would instanteously begin to boycott whoever tried something like that no matter how much I liked the company
“The buzz of an airplane and its flight over my airspace is unquestionably a trespass. But the benefits of allowing the trespass have been deemed to outweigh the costs of enforcing my rights in that 150′ x 150′ column of air above my property.”
There is a certain subjectivity involved in the nuisance. If one airplane flies over my home per day , at high altitude, I’m not going to be bothered enough to go to court over it. If an airport moves next door and lands planes every minute, then it’s going to be a problem.
It’s the same thing with skybanners and blimps and such. So long as there’s only one it’s not a nuisance, but when the sky is completely covered with OrbitADS people are going to complain and then they will all have to be outlawed.
Son: Pop, look up in the sky.
Father: Hmmmmmmm. You’d better go and fetch my Q-switched ruby laser rifle.
Interesting point. I wonder what IDSA thinks of the International Space Station and other artificial satellites financed and operated by the State. For instance, this website chronicles both lunar and solar ISS transits: http://pictures.ed-morana.com/ISSTransits/
And why get all bent out of shape about “unnatural” objects floating in space. What is so reverent and special about “natural” space-based phenomenon? Why doesn’t the IDSA petition for the removal of potentially harmful debris like comets, meteors and asteroids. After all, if geology is any guide, there have been several large world-wide catastrophes caused by the impact of “heavenly bodies.”
If anything, this should be a discussion over private property rights, who owns the “land” or rather “space” at various altitudes. Homesteading would solve this issue.
See also: Pollution and Property Rights in Hong Kong
Under International law and Treaty, all space, and all type of interplanatery bodies, whatsoever, are closed to private ownership in perpetuity. The United Nations officially controls outer space and of course we can all pretty much figure out what that means.
Let’s assume technology has progressed to the point where this scenerio I will draw would be feasible. I build a spacecraft and take 100 colonists to Mars, with sufficient supplies and technology to set up a functioning independent colony. Assume further the colonists are well armed. I could conceivably form a colony and declare it sovereign and independent from United Nations control. Of course, the United Nations could preempt such an action by setting up their own colony and governance.
Bottom line, you are going to have to fight the United Nations tooth and nail every step of the way. They will, of course, want to set up a socialist structure for the use of space.
As an amateur astronomer and telescope builder, billboards in space are an effrontery to me, no less than the glaring lights shown upwardly upon the ego edifices of corporate America much of which misses the building entirely causing whats known as light pollution.
I believe I have a right to see an unpolluted night sky transparent enough for average telescopes to do serious study or casual observation.
However in fairness to all the proposition should be open to debate and voted upon.
Have you ever seen the Milky Way from a really dark site location, how the core and arms of our own galaxy stands out as if cotton candy against the darkness beyond? I think this is preferable to neon in the sky. JMHO.
The homesteading of the night sky long ago already occurred, just as you can obtain a prescriptive easement by habitually walking across somebody’s property (or nobody’s property) unopposed. All habitual star-gazers in at least common law jurisdictions have a prescriptive easement to use of the night sky. Interfering with that easement by disturbing the view is a nuisance: a mass tort that the billboard maker certainly cannot afford. Since this is a public easement (it belongs to at least the general group of habitual star-gazers), it is probably impractical for the billboard operator to try to purchase these rights, unfortunately.
I would appreciate it if “nick” could cite a source for his assertion that one can obtain an easement merely by looking at something.
And “easement” for using space by “looking” at it is really an interesting idea, but I don’t follow its logic.
Ad coelum right (strictly followed) would include atmosphere all the way up to interplanetary gases or space (“sky”), but it would not extend there. If you believe that ad coelum principle is the only one that is consistent with private property right (like I do) you still can’t show that space-billboards interfer with the air that falls on our property – which we breathe and through which we move (ownership of resources that occupy our property). Walter Block’s argument on interference with one’s property is also problematic here, because the space billboard does not interfere with current use of our land (house does not collapse, sunlight is not blocked).
I really don’t know what would be the non-statist argument to prevent space billboards, regardless their ugliness. The free-market way to fight this stupid idea is the consumers’ retaliation against those who would set them up.
I would have to agree with the assertation that there is no non-statist ways to deal with space billboards. I would also assert that there is not much they could do to prevent me from taking the billboards out with a ground based laser.
I would never, ever deal again with any company that would sink to such an obnoxious advertising technique.
If space billboards do get launched, then it’s time to dust off these ….
http://www.vought.com/heritage/products/html/asat.html
What the advertising company fails to mention is what does the sky look like at night with this trash orbiting in the sky.
The reason I would not like to see a large sheet of plastic orbiting around is because it is like going to the park and seeing the styrofoam container laying on the ground being pushed around by the air. It just makes the park look like its well… trashed. What is the difference when a VERY large piece of plastic is left in the atmosphere? Yes, you will make a buck. No, it is not a good move on your part. Is there another way to make money like tatooing yourself or something?
So where are the limitations when it comes to clogging up the view? Let us look at reality if this were allowed to happen. How many billboards would we allow per American company. A couple hundred aerospace billboards per company? How about per civilized country? How many countries are there now? So, what is the number we are looking at to start? How about after two years? Is reality sinking in? (You are in to marketing, you know what I am talking about and probably do not care. (Hey, like I said it is all about the money in your pocket and that big promotion)
Has anybody considered that if something like that is put where everyone in the world can see it (whatever IT is) how many countries will be offended about WHAT is placed on the billboard? In some countries a woman cannot even show their faces or be on a billboard. I can see in the Land-of-sueing-everybody, a.k.a. the United States, that some ladies would sue the advertising company for gender discrimination because they cannot be used for aerospace marketing.
I think that there are more reasons than just offending the environmentalists that you have to look at. I am just playing the devil’s advocate on this.
Goodbye Sun!
If the giant space billboards interrupted satellite transmission traffic, would that be a property rights violation?
“Why is the default “natural” view of the sky so preferable to a sky with some billboards in it?”
Are you serious?
Talk about advertisements pervading our every day lives. There would no longer be an escape, at the point of looking up, past the skyscrapers to the sky we find more propaganda; they will have us wherever we go.
Having bilboards in our very sky will truly define what is “natural” and that is just the problem these days. It won’t be natural, yet it will seem so because of its environmental placement and I’m sure that the graphic designers will make it seem as unsuspicious as possible.
“hey does that cloud look like an ipod to you?”
-”…..maybe.”
hey does that cloud look like an ipod to you?
Subliminal clouds! Great idea…
It’s so interesting:,
I want to show you best movies:,
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