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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

"Though they've been on the ocean floor for a long time, the engines remain the property of NASA."

Interesting, I thought Law of Finds stated that abandoned property belongs to the person who salvages it (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6896645.stm), or maybe the engines were not abandoned?

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The American law of finds applies in only two situations: "(1) where the owners have expressly and publicly abandoned their property and (2) where items are recovered from an ancient shipwreck and no one comes forward to claim them" [1]. I don't think NASA ever satisfied 1.

In international waters it seems like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea does "little to impinge on the applicability of the law of finds and the law of salvage," though "commentators have suggested that the law of finds is implied because there is no alternative ownership principle delineated in the provision" [2].

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer

[1] http://www.rms-republic.com/reference/Volume67No1Article6.pd...

[2] http://lawreview.wustl.edu/inprint/86/1/Curfman.pdf

I find it odd that it can be considered "not abandoned" when NASA didn't even _know_ where they were. I can understand if NASA said something of the sort "its at XX latitude and YY longitude and we're leaving it there but it's still ours", but I find "we don't know where it is and we aren't actively looking to find it, but if you find it it's ours", especially given the Law of Finds.

Not a lawyer, but I would imagine the definition of abandoned has some sense of an indistinguishable owner. In the case of Apollo 11, the owner is quite clear.

On the other hand, if you consider the law of "Finders Keepers, losers weepers" It is clearly Bezos to do what he wants.

Well, I don't see how it differs from a sunken ship, really.

In that case, the owner of the ship typically is still the original owner, but there is a whole "law of salvage" that determines what payment, or share of the treasure if it's things like sunken gold, the finder should get.

I don't know if that is the case with state ships. Recently Spain has recovered a gold and silver treasure from the odissey company(they recovered it from a spanish sunked 1800s tall ship)

government agencies do not relinquish their claims lightly. They don't consider their hardware to be "abandoned", merely "very hard to get to".

My ex-coworkers at the Museum of Flight (in Seattle, mentioned in this article) know the exact location of a WWII-era fighter aircraft that crashed in Lake Washington. They recovered and restored one aircraft from the crash site at least a decade ago, but the Navy will not let them touch the other one.

this may be because there are human remains at the second site, which makes it a war grave. its against federal law to disturb those IIRC

It was a "non-fatal collision" between the two aircraft [0]. Both pilots were rescued [1]. One aircraft was recovered without incident; the other sits corroding at the bottom of the lake. While the second corsair is in worse shape than the first one and therefore a much more significant challenge to recover, I know several people who would jump at the chance to try if they could get permission from the Navy.

[0] http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/goodyear-fg-1d-corsai... [1] http://www.dcsfilms.com/Site_4/Corsair_lake_washington.html

I was just reading about the Lake Washington corsair while I was at the museum lately. It's so cool To hear that there's another one down there.

If you're ever in the museum with time to kill, talk to the docents (in the blue jackets). Almost all of them have pretty amazing stories.

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