Where does outer space legally start? Recently the Billionaire Space Race culminated with both Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, doing what I can tell without any dispute, &quot;going up&quot; and &quot;coming down&quot;. The claim that either of them actually reached space however is hotly debated, with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson telling (paraphrased from this article) First of all, it was suborbital...If you don't go fast enough to reach orbit you will fall and return to Earth...It's okay if you want to call it 'space,' just because average humans haven't gotten there before and it's a first for you. That's why it takes eight minutes to get into orbit and three days to reach the moon...So I don't see it as 'oh, let's go into space'. No. What you are going to have is a nice view of the Earth According to CNN, Neil deGrasse Tyson says that neither Richard Branson nor Jeff Bezos has actually been put into orbit. Of course, we got Elon Musk chiming in and trolling Bezos (I can't find the original one I saw so I am not sure if this is the real one). So where exactly does the Space start according to Governments and governmental agencies? Specifically speaking is there any legal definition of Outer Space in law. [Edit I am citing NdT and Elon to only show there is a dispute/debate. Their opinion need not be legally considered] My research At the Legal Sub-committee meeting of 2018 UN COPUOS, United Nations the Committee for the Peaceful Use of Outer Space, some member states considered that a definition of where air space ends and outer space begins, was important because of space tourism and other activities extending to space. However, others including the US under Bush Administration pointed out that we have done quite well without such definitions and this has caused no problems so far. Historically, it’s been difficult to pin that point at a particular altitude. In the 1900s, Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán determined the boundary to be around 50 miles up, or roughly 80 kilometers above sea level. Today, though, the Kármán line is set at what NOAA calls “an imaginary boundary” that’s 62 miles up, or roughly a hundred kilometers above sea level. The Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), which keeps track of standards and records in astronautics and aeronautics, also defines space as beginning a hundred kilometers up. It is, after all, a nice round number. But the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Air Force, NOAA, and NASA generally use 50 miles (80 kilometers) as the boundary, with the Air Force granting astronaut wings to flyers who go higher than this mark. At the same time, NASA Mission Control places the line at 76 miles (122 kilometers), because that is “the point at which atmospheric drag becomes noticeable,” Bhavya Lal and Emily Nightingale of the Science and Technology Policy Institute write in a 2014 review article. link
Where does outer space legally start? International law does not define the edge of space, or the limit of national airspace according to footnotes 2 and 3 of the Kármán line's Wikipedia entry. Footnote 15, referencing the book International Law: A Dictionary by Boleslaw Adam Boczek, offers this: The issue whether it is possible or useful to establish a legal boundary between airspace and outer space has been debated in the doctrine for quite a long time. … no agreement exists on a fixed airspace – outer space boundary …
You could almost define a country as, "an entity that can defend itself against invasions." Non-sovereign entities are indeed generally prohibited from deploying lethal autonomous defense systems like booby-traps. But governments and state-like actors, as a matter of practice, choose their own rules. laws-of-war and international-law are not like "regular" law: When it comes down to it, states only follow international conventions and treaties to the extent that they consider it to be in their own interest to do so. If you start mining your property, you will probably be forced to stop by local law enforcement. If a warlord starts mining his borders, he's going to get away with it until someone with more power convinces or forces him to stop. Was it "illegal" for Turkey to shoot down a Russian military aircraft? One could cite all sorts of laws and conventions to answer that question. But in practice the consequences of that act are limited to whatever Turkey allows, or to what Russia and its allies can impose on Turkey.
This has obviously never become a legal issue, so the answer is not settled, but it doesn't seem like there would be any good argument for anything other than using time as the employee experiences it. If John Glenn spends 40 hours on space shuttle repair and NASA receives 40 hours' worth of work, the fact that they only noticed 20 hours going by doesn't seem to justify slashing the worker's wages.
You are wrong that they never get into legal trouble. It isn't terribly common but it certainly happens to those that get relatively prominent. Many of the folks doing the copyright infringement are judgement proof. It makes little sense for Disney, for example, to sue some guy living in his parents' basement for uploading a clip of their movie when that guy has no assets. Financially, it wouldn't be worth the cost of a lawyer. Many of the folks doing the copyright infringement are in jurisdictions that look the other way. If you're a Russian citizen pirating content owned by American companies, the Russian authorities aren't going to cooperate and arrest you and the American companies likely can't recover any judgement they'd get because you don't have any assets in America. There is a whack-a-mole problem. If there are hundreds of people posting pirated content to Facebook and each one is running hundreds of pages, that's tens of thousands of pages posting content. By the time you identify and close all of them, the pirates will have created tens of thousands of new pages. There is a cat-and-mouse problem. Copyright owners have automated tools to scan for their IP to issue takedown notices. Piraters know this so they modify the video (posting it as a mirror image or adding some additional video elements) in order to evade the automated tools. If copyright owners have to manually identify pirated content, it's realistically not cost effective to do so. The humans finding that content would cost more than the business loses in revenue to pirates. Tracking down the actual human/ business behind the copyright infringement is often a fair amount of work and may involve motions in courts in multiple countries. That work tends not to be highly prioritized by law enforcement. If you're a small fish, it is unlikely that anyone would go to the effort of unmasking you in order to sue.
A property owner can give you an easement for the air rights of their property, which can allow you to put your own structure over their property or prevent them from putting a structure over their property (depending on the terms of the easement). For instance, a railroad might sell the air rights to an urban rail yard to a private developer so that the developer can put buildings over top of the yard. A high-rise owner might buy an easement for a neighboring property that bans them from building above a certain height in order to keep the views from the high-rise unblocked. However, a property owner can't sell you rights that they themselves don't have. The US government has exclusive sovereignty over US airspace, and there's a public right of transit through navigable airspace (defined as airspace above minimum safe flight altitudes). While the traditional rule was that a property owner owned their land up to infinity, with the development of airplanes this rule has been changed to significantly limit the rights of property owners. The FAA doesn't limit how tall a property owner can build (although too-tall structures can be declared hazards to navigation, which can cause issues with planning boards or insurance companies). However, if there are no obstructions, the airspace above 500 feet in rural areas (in built-up areas it depends on local obstructions) is open for pilots to fly through. The only way to get obstruction-free airspace restricted is to try to get the FAA to issue a flight restriction. If you're trying to get large swaths of airspace restricted, this is extremely unlikely to happen.
Constitution of the USA, Article IV, Section 1: Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof. and the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, clause 3): [The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; SCOTUS has found the former to mean that states that do not allow same-sex marriages in their laws must recognize same-sex marriages registered by other states - Obergefell v. Hodges. Maybe one could argue that driver licenses are not equivalent among states, but I would expect judges (SCOTUS) to require a very well reasoned explanation. For example, maybe Alaska could refuse to recognize licenses from Florida because Florida drivers do not know how to cope with snowed roads. But even in that case Alaska probably would need to produce data showing that these measures aim to serve the public interest (avoid accidents) and that there are no other ways of getting the same result. OTOH the Commerce Clause has been successfully used to avoid states mandating racial segregation of travellers, so it is quite reasonable to see it being used to prevent a state from trying to limit the mobility of citizens from other states (again, in the supposition that the state restricting it cannot show a compelling reason to do so). AFAIK, only the Federal Government could invoke the Commerce Clause; I would expect a lot more people (in your example, the PA government or maybe even any PA driver) would have standing.
In general, people have less expectation of privacy in cars than in their homes. To challenge a search and/or seizure under the Fourth Amendment, a person must have standing - the right to sue (that is, you must have had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the place where the search happened; if you didn't, no standing - can't claim your privacy was violated if you had no privacy). The US Circuit Courts are split on the issue of unauthorized rental drivers and whether they have the same reasonable expectation of privacy as the authorized driver of a rental car would have. Some Circuits allow the unauthorized driver to challenge a car search if the authorized driver gave them permission. Some Circuits look only at the agreement and if the driver isn't authorized on that, they're out of luck. The 6th Circuit is more case-by-case, with a presumption that driver can't challenge the search that can be overcome based on the facts. (All this info from US v. Haywood, 324 F.3d 514) There's a current case before the Supreme Court (argued January 9, 2018), Byrd v. US, on this very issue. This SCOTUSblog page has a lot of information on the case. Edited to add: Texas is in the Fifth Circuit, which follows the rule that unauthorized drivers don't have standing to challenge a search/seizure even with the authorized driver's permission to drive the car; unauthorized drivers of rental cars don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy because they lack a possessory interest in the car and/or they're violating the rental agreement. Basically, even though it seems the cops' stop of the car would've violated the Fourth Amendment if he were the authorized driver, since this happened in Texas, he's not going to be able to challenge the stop. IMO, this is incredibly unjust especially when the cops admitted there was no probable cause, so hopefully the Supreme Court makes this rule obsolete and allows unauthorized drivers to exercise their Fourth Amendment rights. Some law review articles on the topic of unauthorized rental drivers: "Hertz and the Fourth Amendment" "Resolving a Three-Way Circuit Split"
In the United States, I would strongly expect that an accurate depiction of historical fact (even if uncomfortably graphic) would be protected under the First Ammendment. Otherwise, the government could functionally censor the worst parts of history (as being too awful to discuss or depict), which is exactly the kind of thing the First Amendment is designed to prevent. There are three important categories of speech that are not protected: (1) "fighting words" directed at a person intended to provoke a fight, (2) words that infict emotional distress such that it qualifies as a tort, and (3) speech that court finds to qualify as "obscenity". Of these three, your game probably will not qualify for the first, since it generally requires speech directed at a specific person or people. I also suspect (less confidently) that an emotional-distress tort would not succeed since your game is not directed at any particular living people. Even if the game caused emotional distress to someone, your public release of the game probably could not qualify as a tort against that specific player who happens to experience emotional distress. The Miller test is used to determine if a work is obscenity. Wikipeida summarizes its three parts, all of which must be satisfied to constitute obscenity: Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law, Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The first two are explicitly sexual in nature. I don't know if there is any similar prohibition against hyper-violence, but even if there were, as long as your game does not run afoul of the "lacks serious artistic value" condition, you will be on the safe side of the line. Note that none of this stops anyone from initiating legal action against you (which may cause headaches for you); it only stops those legal actions from succeededing.