"Who owns public art illegally placed onto private buildings? That’s a question that came up recently after a famous Banksy work in London was ripped out of the side of a building, shipped across the Atlantic, and put up for auction with an estimated final price of over half a million dollars."
Board members believed that they had the right under Virginia law, but the Farrans saw an illegal power grab that had no basis in the HOA’s covenants. When the board, acting at a meeting that was not publicly announced, rejected the Farrans’ roof and deck projects for aesthetic and architectural reasons, the Farrans said it was retribution.
“It’s like we weren’t living in America,” Maria Farran said. “You are always one board election away from a tyranny. They wield enormous power.”
The Farrans filed a lawsuit against the HOA saying it didn’t have the authority to impose fines and had vindictively rejected their home improvements.
"The accident had clearly stripped Johnson of substantial happiness, and he demanded compensation for that loss—"hedonic damages," in legal parlance. Other noneconomic tort awards, like money doled out for emotional distress, are arbitrary, based on little more than the jury's intuition and the size of past sums. There's no such thing as an expert witness on pain and suffering, since it's acknowledged that there's no way to calculate something so subjective. Hedonic damages, by contrast, are ostensibly rooted in science, based on a statistical formula that purports to translate a lifetime of joie de vivre into cold cash. That means the plaintiff can put an expert witness on the stand to explain the principles of hedonic damages and moisten a few jurors' eyes. Such testimony is often ruled inadmissible because of doubts that forensic economists can compute joy. But when the testimony works, it can inspire jurors to dole out millions."
"The jury in the Johnson case seemed swayed by that logic. It awarded $3.5 million to Johnson and his wife, far more than they would have recovered had they pressed only for economic damages of lost wages and medical costs. How the jury arrived at that multimillion-dollar figure is a mystery to Smith, as he did not suggest an exact sum—and never does. "I orient them to the concept and give them the statistical values, then leave the final tailoring up to them," he said."
As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. A poor student who could afford only rice was eating his rice while enjoying the delicious cooking smells coming from the food shop. The owner wanted the student to pay for the smells he was enjoying. The student was stealing his smells!
This story often comes to mind when I hear the RIAA and MPAA accusing people of stealing music and movies.
[snip]
What counts as property depends on what works to treat as property. And that not only can change, but has changed. Humans may always (for some definition of human and always) have treated small items carried on one's person as property. But hunter gatherers didn't treat land, for example, as property in the way we do.
The reason so many people think of property as having a single unchanging definition is that its definition changes very slowly
