> There needs to be a legal means for property owners to keep drones off their property
Does there? Why? There's no legal means to keep private aircraft (e.g. a Cessna) from flying over your property as long as they're over 500 feet. Then drones are below that, typically between 50-400 feet.
They're already not allowed to interfere with your property or privacy however. They can't hover to annoy you, or get close to snap pictures or whatever.
If you're concerned about accidents and safety, then the solution is safety regulation. But the idea that drones must keep track of which individual properties allow flight above and which don't, and try to navigate some around some kind of patchwork accordingly, is simply unpractical and unreasonable.
If drones turn out to be a general nuisance then cities/counties can ban them altogether or whatever as a collective decision, but the idea that individual property owners should be able to ban them is a terrible idea.
Perhaps individual property rights should go up to that 500 foot limit. Or at least some limit. It doesn't seem quite right that property rights end at ground level.
Your property rights don't end at ground level.
They do go up into the air, but it's basically "dozens" of feet, as opposed to hundreds. Drones can't fly at 10 ft above your property, that's clearly considered trespass/nuisance. But at 300 ft it's totally fine.
There's no exact precise "hard" limit like 100 ft because there doesn't need to be, and it depends on the height of your home, etc. But drones already aren't allowed to just hover above your pool at eye level. But if it's just passing overhead with plenty of room to spare and not specifically bothering you, then that doesn't belong to your property. Nor should it.
You probably didn't have rights to the minerals below ground level, either!
How about drones only fly over public roads when they are below 500 feet?
But why?
If you're concerned about safety, you'd prefer an out-of-control drone hits a car instead of a backyard or farmer's field?
And if you're concerned about noise, homes tend to be along roads anyways. So it's not going to change that.
And FYI, they're basically always below 500 feet, so they don't hit planes.
I believe that they were responding to this specific part of your comment:
> But the idea that drones must keep track of which individual properties allow flight above and which don't, and try to navigate some around some kind of patchwork accordingly, is simply unpractical and unreasonable
Flying over public roads would be a way to avoid flying over properties that do not allow drones and would not be unpractical.
How about we start recognizing that the occasional nuisance scaled up turns into real harm, and prohibit drones owned/operated by non-individuals from flying over anything that isn't a public way or a consensual waypoint?. This retains the ability for individual personal use and even innovation (with one's own skin in the game), while mostly heading off the perverse incentives of businesses creating externalities at scale and then ultimately enclosing the commons.
In general our society desperately needs to stop denying this basic division, and burden individuals less while applying heavier regulations to corporations/LLCs - ie artificial legal entities created by government whose sine-qua-non is already large amounts of paperwork. For another example, most of the opposition to digital privacy regulation would become moot.