Is projecting a message onto the wall of a building a trespass?

> action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property.

It is neither damage nor destruction unless you use a nearly incomprehensible definition of either word.

You might be able to call it disturbing the peace but that's criminal and not civil so removes some ability to seek redress from the building owner.

Vandalism law shouldn't even care if the cost to repair the damage is zero. With regular vandalism offering to clean and repair the damage might convince the victim to not press changes, but it's not a get out of jail free card, they can still press charges.

Also, I assume damage to reputation before the vandalism was 'repaired' can be taken into account under current law.

The article is essentially the legal reasoning from the Nevada Court of Appeal - some fairly experienced legal minds examining the situation (in this case, via an appeal).

They're fairly clear in how they examine the situation and that no accepted definition of trespass applies and suggest some recourse to 'victims' who could, rather than incur huge legal fees, simply set their own competing projector to overcome the undesired images. An example of appeal judges being fairly pragmatic and laying a foundation for lawyers handling future cases to suggest better resolutions than expensive litigation - if only they'd read appeal court decisions /and remember them/.

However, they do also suggest there is a case to consider the situation a nuisance (s.4) and take action that way.

Given they make no mention of vandalism as an avenue, it seems quite evident the experienced legal experts suggest the situation is one of nuisance and should be handled as that if resorting to law.

Why should anyone on HN argue with a qualified legal opinion by suggesting alternative legal strategies?

It seems the core of this issue is the definition of "tangible". Why does the law profession choose to use such obtuse wording? There doesn't appear to be any way for normal people or even lawyers to identify if something is tangible in the way the law describes it.

Legislators should draft a law that defines what 'it' is (e.g. not ambient light), what is excluded (art? abandoned buildings?), and how bad is it (jail, fine, etc).

This is a problem which Marshall McLuhan wrote about frequently, he described our situation as if we were navigating the present like someone driving down the road using only the rear view mirror.

>Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

But, as I said, I might be wrong.

As a property owner, you should not have to request (by means of a "Post No Bills" message or other) that other people don't interfere with your property.

Not even that is necessarily true, since in many cases there are superseding laws covering the external appearance of buildings and to what extent they can be used as billboards (and what those billboards can and cannot display)

If the beam can cause injury, there's that.

If it's done in a manner meant to annoy, intimidate, or harrass, quite possibly.

See as a general parallel paparrazi laws, in some regions. Being in public doesn't provide you with unlimited capacity to act, particularly as that influences others.

My guess is that they could also claim nuisance.

"The traditional common-law view was that property injury caused by such things as light, gas, sound, smoke, odors, or vibrations might constitute an actionable nuisance under the right circumstances, but could not support a cause of action in trespass."