In its 10:00 p.m. news last night, New York’s WNYW used drone footage as part of a story about a small plane crash on Long Island. Then the FOX owned station looked into the legality of using unmanned aerial vehicles to cover the news.
“When I heard that the police helicopters and news choppers couldn’t get video footage of what was going on because of the cloud cover that was today,” Nick Borella, the guy who used his drone to shoot the plane crash, told WNYW’s Stacey Delikat. “I thought that I would get over and have a chance to help them out any way that I could because I could fly in that.”
WNYW’s admission it didn’t pay for the footage did two things, it furthered the conversation about drone usage and according to Brendan Schulman, an attorney who runs the unmanned aircraft system group for law firm Kramer Levin, cleared them of any wrongdoing since the FAA only frowns on commercial use.
The question raised? Does this change anything for drone operators looking to get paid for their work?