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Orbdev Files US Federal Suit Over Asteroid Claim
chongo writes "Orbital
Development has
filed
legal action against the United States by filing a Complaint for Declaratory Judgment in Federal Court.
After NASA's NEAR
probe landed
on the
asteroid
433 Eros,
Gregory W. Nemitz,
who
claims
to have owned the asteroid since the 3rd of March 2000,
sent NASA an $20 invoice for the
first 100 years of parking and storage fees.
NASA told him to "pound
sand".
OrbDev's
Eros
Project seeks to promote their ludicrous ideas about property rights in
space."
Right? Or maybe something like Stranger in a Strange Land, where they sue for ownership of Mars but really want to be denied and set the precedent.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Pointing to a bright light in the sky and saying "mine" doesn't make it so.
Did OrbDev fly up there to mark the boundaries of their claim? Somehow, I think not.
Good luck in enforcing that.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
... but unfortunately isn't so. If the judge decides NASA has to pay this could cause serious trouble for future space exploration, for as far as I know most of the lunar and martian surface is already sold. If everybody from now on can claim money if something touches "his" property, this could possibly cause second thoughts. better to say "please place a ticket on our vehicle (harrharr) - and we will remove it as soon as possible".
On the other hand side wasn't there a treaty signed sometimes in the 60's that forbade the claim for extraterrestrial property?
".Sig Stealer" was here
"If you do not occupy or otherwise improve your claimed property, you shall be considered derelect and in abandoment of said property and all entitlements therein" ...or similar wording on the US lawbooks for over 100 years now. Or is this a case of what is old is new again?
Did someone have to walk all the way to the Mississippi and put a flag there to claim it? Or did someone say, "I claim this land and all land to the 90th meridian, between the 35th and 40th parallels, to be Frungyland." (named after the esteemed sport, of course).
I've read books about objectivism. I'm afraid I tend not to agree with it. Not that Ayn Rand ever really admited that anyone but her even understood it.
That alone tends to send up my red flags and move the needle of the bullshit meter at least a lot closer to the red zone.
Now please don't get me wrong. I'm anything but an anticapitalist and not against property rights, per se, but my ideas of such are rather more Thoreauian (who, counter to popular opinion, was a practicing capitalist and clearly would have thought a federal welfare system was a daft idea).
I think one must realize that property in the sense that you own the chair you whittled yourself is something rather different than real property. An insect may recognize the former, but not that latter, although they recognize the looser concept of territory or "personal space."
Real "property" rights are simply an extension into the capitalist realm of fuedal/tribalistic territorialism of the kind that Rand despised. I've always found this a bit ironic. Had capitalism not evolved out of such fuedal societies it isn't entirely clear that it ever would have developed a concept of real property at all. It isn't inate to the philosophy, and one might even argue that it's somewhat counter to it.
People didn't buy land. They took it. By force, and defended it by force. Then they could claim the right to "sell" that which they had stolen from the public domain. All real property comes from such a background.
So, you want to claim ownership to an asteroid? Well buddy, you better get your ass out there and build a castle. Then when someone else comes along you tell them to shove off or pay the toll.
If they're sitting there and you can't march the knights out of the castle to defend "your" land, well, guess what, you never owned it in the first place. Where there is no prexisting local legal jurisdiction it's back to might makes right.
Or in the more colorful vernacular, Shit or get off the pot.
If you yourself think we're going to develop property "rights" to space through some local process you're just as daft. We're going to fight and kill for them, just as we always have. And when we "discover" the "people" who already "own" a bit of space we might well expect them to take exception to that and fight back.
Quite frankly I'm already rooting for them, because we've got no fucking right.
KFG
The obvious route to take would be to legislate (as international law, not US law) that you can only lay claim to Extra Terrestrial Real Estate (ETRE from now on) if you can land on it.
This would indeed solve the immediate story - keep the loonies out of courts and from having any legal basis for such claims.
It would, however, create some bigger problems.
Here's a few probs with "Landers-Keepers":
1. Instead of starting stellar colonization as a single political entity (eg humanity/earth), we'll just start another colony race (eg china vs US for example, like Britain vs. France vs. lesser colonizers a century ago) and deepen division between world powers instead of using this exact endeavor to bridge across and achieve something together.
2. What's to prevent someone with a home-made rocket (eg starchaser, or the X-prize-winner-to-be) from actually landing there and forming his own country? would that be in the best interests of you? me? the US? Humanity?
And this brings us to the big kahoona.
3. Whose interests do we aim to serve by this sort of legislation?
The US? I daresay Europe and Asia will disagree.
The UN? The UN is just short of owned by 1 billion oil-supplying muslims. That wouldn't be so bad at all, if the muslim world hadn't been a poverty-stricken, politically-faltering, violence-promoting human-life-has-no-value culture at the core of which lies Jihad upon which quite a large chunk of the world's next generation of muslims are raised.
Even richer arab countries like Saudi Arabia are extremely polarized between westernization-seekers and this ugly side of the Islam.
I daresay that the US will disagree to serve these radicals and their agendas.
Humanity _does_ include 1 billion arabs and you can't exclude them. But when you count humanity as a whole, you suddenly realize that there is no common agenda to serve by ETRE legislation. You are eventually going to displease a large portion of this planet.
Finally, I'll point out that legislation on this is entire nonsense in itself, as legislation is useless without some form of enforcement. Face it, if the moon belongs to NASA and some rogue party lands on it, there is NOBODY that can remove him and throw him in jail.
The best solution would probbably be:
a. Keep working hard to eventually reach ETRE.
Ignore mosquito bites like the article above. At this stage, a space race actually serves humanity quite well, as it drives tech development faster.
b. Keep this legally vague for as long as possible (until someone can actually sheriff ETRE). If this doesn't clarify for a while yet, the arab world might by then reach the point where (Golda Meir quote) "They love their children more than they hate someone else's".
Wait for an entity that all humanity can trust to appear and pose a common-to-all agenda. Then and only then legislate something along the lines of
"ETRE initially belongs to said entity" and then be distributed and regulated much like US soil real estate.
Cheers.
-
But sending NASA an invoice that they pay might....
Luckily the clerk wasn't asleep and NASA didn't actually pay.
paintball
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
He's got balls the size of 433 Eros.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I feel compelled to respond on this as I feel it could be the most important issue of the 21st century - especially if the X Prize boys get their mojo on.
Property rights essentially appeared at the same time as the Agricultural Revolution about twelve to fifteen thousand years ago. For the first time, you really couldn't move down the valley a bit if someone you didn't like lived near you. You had a field, and that was the only way your (suddenly) large family could live through the winter. If you let him take or use what you'd literally broken yourself to create - you would die. Harsh stuff, and the reason the core of every successful legal system in the world enshrines property rights over all others. Even the U.S. constitution has property rights so mixed in, so tightly bound, that it mentions them again and again - they were as natural and obvious to the founding fathers as breathing.
So we move on to an age where agriculture is no longer quite as central to our lives. Suddenly we are coming up against the limits of property rights. "Intellectual Property" seems to be an obvious idea to an industrial economy - a simple extension of the concept that's allowed the human population to take over the world. As the discussions on /. have shown, this is no longer quite so obvious, so compelling.
Already you can see where I'm leading. If we take the idea of ownership as we normally see it and then apply it to the stars we come into some severe problems.
No consortium of insurance companies in the world, not even the whole of the Lloyds of London market could insure against a mis-directed asteroid impacting with the Pacific. So how could any mining corporation ever hope to start liberating resources from our solar system? Remember that the Lloyds market is the clearing-house for all insurance and re-insurance in the world, and even they struggled to swallow the risk from the Space Shuttle. Even then it took the intervention of the U.S. Government as insurer-of-last-resort to placate the market-makers.
So don't take responsibility: Let anyone get on with doing what they want? No claim means no liability? Right?
What happens when two mining companies lay claim to the same stretch of asteroids? If they are in the same orbit, and therefore easier to get at, both companies are going to want to protect their investment. Do we want to return to the days when warring villages were continuously slaughtering each other? When simply travelling outside the palisade meant risking death?
Here's another example. What if settlers arrive, and then someone else causes problems - e.g. their solar arrays are rendered useless by the cloud of particulates raised by a "nearby" extraction operation. They could go to court for help. It is a clear tort. After all, they can file electronically and it's only a twenty-four hour round trip to the central courthouse computers. There's just a small problem: They are dying for lack of air right now.
Here's the solution: There isn't one. Not with our current expectations and society.
As with all problems where human beings are involved, this is going to have to evolve. The societal structures that have worked so well for us down here are going to have to change. That isn't to say that there won't be governments, charities and corporations.
More likely, we'll have to have a long and drawn out struggle between the varying imperatives: "It's mine!" "You can't do that to me!" "If you try to stop me I'll defend my rights!" "You must leave that alone!"
Hopefully not too many will die. Some will.
Who knows what will emerge? The governing-corporation? The feudal charity? Maybe the gift economy shown so beautifully in the Open Source Movement will be the governing paradigm? All I know is that our system isn't going to stay the same - because it cannot work when celestial mechanics becomes a part of your insurance quote.
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
...on January 27, 1967, when they nationalized 99.9* percent of everything. The UN Outer Space Treaty purports to make the entirety of outer space off limits to property, held in trust for "mankind". Supposedly, Earth is the single oasis of individual ownership in the vast communist deeps. Yes, I said communist, and I meant it! What else do you call banning all private ownership - of nearly everthing in existence? Besides pure bloody minded hubris.
This treaty is the dragon that the Eros Project is trying to slay. They are attempting to creeate case law backing the natural right to claim, take, and use unowned frontier land - even in space.
If you support private space ventures such as X-Prize, you should also support OrbDev.
Although, he may have a claim against Orbdev for selling him something they did not own {ever been to Paris and had someone try to sell you the Eiffel tower? Or been to London and had someone try to sell you Tower Bridge? Or } Well, you get the idea. And it's Orbdev that are going to be needing the lawyers, because fraud is criminal, not civil.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Think about what 'ownership of land' is really.
My first thought was 'well if he hasn't planted a flag there then how could he own it?'.
But that argument really doesn't stand the test of time. There are plenty of people that own land and property that they have never set foot on. Nothing strange about that.
So the moon is a tad farther away, and this asteroid a bit farther then that.
Distance isn't the problem.
The law isn't either.
It is enforceability and protection of said property.
A business owner who owns property on the other side of the country has many different tools protecting his ownership of the property. He has local, state and federal laws that specifically give him ownership, he can buy security service, he can hire people to protect his property, these are the ways that he takes ownership.
As long as his defenses are better then your offenses, as long as he wins the case of ownership and you loose then he owns the property.
And it isn't neccesarily laws that protect property ownership.
Take Saddam as an example. Saddam owned palaces all over Iraq. A year ago the owner of those palaces was not in question. You could try to lay claim to those palaces, but when Saddam was done with you, well lets just say you would apologize for your stupidity.
But now the US owns those palaces. We didn't go to court and prove anything.
We took them.
By force.
With big guns.
And in Iraq we are basicaly saying 'We don't need no stinking laws, if you think you own this property, then we challenge you to take it.'.
This has a bearing on this crackpot who sent Nasa a $20 parking ticket.
So dude has a peace of paper saying that he owns said asteroid. Isn't that nice.
Nasa dissagrees.
If dude can find a judge that will enforce his parking ticket against Nasa, then dude wins, ergo dude 'owns' the asteroid.
If dude cannot succesfully collect payment from Nasa then dude is left with one more option.
Eviction.
If dude can get the finances together, and the means, and the smarts to knock Nasa's probe off the asteroid then dude would truly own the asteroid.
But if dude cannot evict Nasa, and cannot enforce payment, then dude certainly doesn't own the asteroid.
This may all seem like the petty politics of a crackpot.
But China wants to put a man on the moon in the next 10 years.
The only thing stopping China from planting a Chinese flag and claiming the moon is a piece of paper that China may or may not have signed.
The error in the thinking of mr. Nemitz seems to be typical for some legal "experts" in the US.
Less then a day ago we saw the story of a US company threatening an Italian Subject with the DMCA, those two claims have in common that these "experts" seem to lack the concept that there are areas where US law is NOT valid or applicable.
This is often called Imperialism and is generally frowned upon in civil societies.
In the case of Antarctica there is a (UN sponsored) treaty that allows states that are treaty members to use (as in loan) some areas in the Antarctic but they will not own it.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
There were communes in the 70s that used a bid system for jobs instead of money. The more bids, the less points. Everyone had to work to a certain number of points. All jobs were open to bidding. Cleaning paid high points, exercising horses paid really low. It actually worked pretty well when people didn't rig the bids (which of course people did).
Ask the native americans who owns the land. Once upon a time they would have laughed at the concept of owning the land. If you weren't there and using it then how could you deny it to anyone else and furthermore, what right did you have to spoil and damage it for your children. Now they understand too well what ownership means. It means that you will punish those who use something that you have told them not to.
This is often forgotten because we live in a world where we observe these 'laws' and they become our reality. The shifting of these concepts into a new frontier (asteroids) temporarily shows us the arbitrariness of it all. This will last until a property law adapts to cover space and we get used to it again, or until it collapses and we find a different way to orgainize ourselves out there.
The question of whether land claims in space are legal meaningless as far as moral rights go. Claim whatever you want. The correct question is who has the biggest 'guns' to control this space. You can bet new laws will be introduced to allow the government to parcel it out to those it favours, but these laws are in reality no more than threats from a government maintaining its power in a new frontier. That is why this man has no hope in hell of claiming an asteroid. The same goes for people who 'own' part of the moon. They have no 'guns' and thus no power to defend themselves. The government will say 'mine' and the laws are just its way of phrasing that.
Thing is, the US government doesn't have enough guns in the long run, no more than George III did some years ago with another colony. My advice is to get out there and start mining. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. The other tenth is possession.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
"Natural person" is distinguished from "corporate person," i.e., a company. And companies are covered by "non-governmental entity." IANAL.
Locke studied this kind of issue:
when can the commons be appropriated by a private individual?
(1) Individuals can appropriate common goods for their private use.
Reason: because of necessity. If a person is to survive, then by necessity he must take some of the commons for his own use (food, shelter etc).
(2) One justly appropriates common goods by virtue of laboring on them.
Reason: a person owns his own body and his own labor. When he applies this to a previously unowned thing (e.g. works a plot of land to create a harvest), his personal property interests are mixed with that thing and he can claim it as his own.
(3) There are limitations ot the right to acquire unkowned property: (a) you cannot acquire property that you have not worked with your labor, (b) you can only acquire so much as you can use without spoilage and (c) you must leave "as much and as good" as you take (e.g. the acquisition should not impoversh the commons). An example of C is that if there are many oases on a desert route, you can take one and improve it for your private use. However if there is only one, this must remain in the commons.
Locke goes on to point out that these limitations are somewhat ameliorated by the introduction of money. Because you can purchase the labor of others, thta labor becomes your labor, and you can use it to claim more from the commons than you can personally mix your labor with. Likewise, he asserts since you can covert resources into cash and cash is in essence unspoilable, you can acquire more of a resource than you can make personal use of. Finally, because people can purchase the use of things from you, it becomes possible to acquire the entire stock of a resource without making it impossible for other people to survive.
Locke then goes on to argue that people, by accepting the use of money, have accepted the consequences which include vastly unequal wealth and power. Once he gets to this point, he becomes more controversial. Locke was no socialist: he was an advocate of the pursuit of unlimited wealth and personal power, taken from the commons if necessary, even to the point of believing some human beings could own others. Yet even he would not say you could claim something without lifting a finger to do something with it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't completly agree with Ayn Rand, but I think you are missing her point.
Ayn Rand based her system of rights on property rights explicity because she belived that without property rights, all other rights were meaningless. Of what use is freedom of speech if the government owns all the food? You own yourself, the governmnet does not own you, nor does anyone else. The government.. ie. force.. should only be used to prevent other people taking your property by force (theft) or guile (breach of contract).
Personally, I think Ayn Rand would be appaled by this fellow with the Asteroid. I doubt she would have been much impressed by someone pointing to a rock in the sky and saying 'Mine! Mine!'. Now, if someone manages to build a ship and land on an asteroid, I think that's a different story...
Jyth
If you're interested, here is a good intro to the philosophy of voluntary association. You are certainly not the only one who doesn't "get it" right off the bat. I didn't either.
Like all other visiting officials, NEAR and NASA can simply refuse to pay parking tickets under diplomatic immunity. It happens on Earth, why not the rest of the cosmos?
Man I wish Douglas Adams were with us to chime in here.
Anybody want a peanut?
Yes... a lot like Bush's corrupted version of my country, the U.S.A. Of course I don't hate Bush himself, I just hate what he and his vultures have done to the carcass of a once decent nation.
Un-news
One could argue that the American Indians had no concept of land ownership, and that they didn't realize what it meant to buy and sell land.
Only if you know nothing about American Indians. Native Americans as a group actually exhibited highly sophisticated concepts of land ownership, including negotiating rights connected to the land (hunting, farming, etc.). Do you think it's a coincidence that so many towns in New England are "Springfield", or some other "...field"? The european settlers didn't come ashore to virgin wilderness. They came ashore and found thriving agricultural communities, towns and even cities.
Happily for those settlers, the germs they carried resulted in mortality rates of 95% or more in the native communities, which meant free farms, often already planted. Unhappily for us, that mortality rate and the european position on natives at the time means that we don't get to hear about the history of those groups before that time.
As for the Manhattan purchase, those who "bought" Manhattan actually bought hunting rights for one season from a group not local to Manhattan. When the actual residents objected to being moved out, and requested a hearing, most were killed. The Louisana purchase is similarly troubling, since the US apparently bought the territory of more than a hundred native nations from the French without consulting with any of the Indian nations involved. The fact that many of those nations had gone to all the trouble of sending ambassadors to europe was of little inconvenience to the US or the French.
This is not to present Indians as universally noble, many groups allied with european settlers to gain an advantage over competing groups, and were often quite brutal when they had the upper hand. Still other groups picked up the european habit of scalping with a vengance (used by europeans to establish headcounts for any of several bounties on indian lives).
But don't pretend that they didn't have sophisticated concepts of land ownership. They most definitely did. What they didn't have was resistance to european germs and the firearms and organization to balance the military might of the european settlers. During the US expansion to the west coast, the US signed literally hundreds of treaties with native american nations. And broke every single treaty. Every one. Since then, the US has done just a little better. After all, they still have the casinos...
Regards,
Ross
Last time I checked, the US writing and signing a treaty made it a party to that treaty.