If you're a fan of drones, you might want to be a little bit cautious about how you display your flying footage. According to a few recent reports, the Federal Aviation Administration appears to be cracking down on drone enthusiasts who might not even realize that they're dipping their toes into what constitutes "commercial" flying.

And commercial drone flying is restricted by the FAA right nowyou'll need the agency's permission to fly your unmanned aircraft for commercial use. That will invariably change at some point in the future, once an FAA proposal goes through that requires commercial drone operators to obtain flying certificates, renew that certificate every two years, and operate within certain flight restrictions.

Back to the hobbyists. According to Vice's Motherboard magazine, the FAA sent a letter this week to a drone hobbyist who posted his videos on YouTube. Since YouTube comes with advertisingwhich an account holder can toggle on and off for his or her videosthe drone's footage, and thus the drone flight, is considered "commercial."

"This office has received a complaint regarding your use of an unmanned aerial vehicle (aka drone) for commercial purposes referencing your video on the website youtube.com as evidence," reads a letter sent to drone enthusiast Jayson Hanes, from FAA aviation inspector Michael Singleton.

"After a review of your website, it does appear that the complaint is valid."

The complaint bit is the most interesting part of the letter. It's not as if the FAA is going around YouTube to police drone enthusiasts who forgot to disable the advertising for their videos. Rather, the process that resulted in Hanes receiving a letter appears to have started from someone else tipping off the FAA's Tampa, Florida office about his flying. How they managed to then find him, and ensure they were sending a letter to the correct Jayson Hanes, is another matter entirely.

"I have never accepted a payment from Google, or YouTube in any shape or form for this. They maybe enabled it to collect page-views, but I'm not getting paid for it. This is not a commercial operation, I'm not selling anything. If anything, it's YouTube trying to recover costs for hosting the content and making it available on their platform," Hanes said in an interview with local news affiliate Fox 13.

"This is my art, that I've been producing with the ability of this drone," he added.

According to an FAA spokesperson, speaking to Vice, the agency is looking into how it might work the subject of advertising into the letters it sends to drone operatorsseeing as the letter Hanes received mostly discusses the nuances of model aircraft regulations, but doesn't really go into detail about the commercialization aspect. We think Hanes would probably like to know how a flight that was intended to be an amateur one ended up becoming a commercial one after-the-fact.

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