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FAA Says Ad-Bearing YouTube Drone Videos Constitute "Commercial Use"
schwit1 writes If you fly a drone and post footage on YouTube, you could end up with a letter from the Federal Aviation Administration. Earlier this week, the agency sent a legal notice to Jayson Hanes, a Tampa-based drone hobbyist who has been posting drone-shot videos online for roughly the last year. The FAA said that, because there are ads on YouTube, Hanes's flights constituted a commercial use of the technology subject to stricter regulations and enforcement action from the agency. It said that if he did not stop flying 'commercially,' he could be subject to fines or sanctions.
I think you want to refer to the Commerce Clause. And, the action is not agains "speech" per se, but against the commercial use of drones. The FAA won't bother him about advertising revenue from non-drone videos, or about using drones as a hobby. It's when he combines the two that it becomes a commercial activity (and yes, earning advertising revenue via Youtube is Interstate Commerce).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
simply posting the video to youtube does not in and of itself, generate income.
Yes, but he is a registered ad affiliate of Youtube. In other words, he has given his name, his mailing address, and his social security number in the hope of one day, having enough subscribers and viewers to receive an actual check through the mail.
From his own attorney:
Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar.
Granted, the number of video views hasn't met the minimum threshold to be cut an actual check yet, but his intent is there. And the fact that he hasn't cancelled his affiliate status with Youtube yet, which would solve the entire problem in one swoop without needing to delete his existing channel, just means that he's hoping to generate enough page views through an artificially created controversy.
Youtubers with popular videos get an offer from google to "monetize" the videos. If they accept, google inserts ads into your video, and pays them some of what they earn from advertisers". If you don't do this then there will normally be no ads in your youtube videos (though there may be ads elsewhere on the page, I guess - I use adblocking, so I'm not sure).
So a standard youtube video is non-commercial, since the person who created and/or uploaded the video gets no compensation for doing so. A subset of "monetized" videos are commercial because of the income from the inserted ads. I can see the FAA being against the latter kind of youtube drone video, but not the former kind.