One thing I noticed in this year’s video, and I think it was the same in past years, is that the supposed contents of the bait package is not hidden from the thief. In other words, these aren’t brown shipping boxes with unknown contents, it’s disguised as an item shipped in its original packaging. This year it appears to be some sort of Apple speaker. So in theory, the thief “knows” what they are stealing and should really not have a reason to open it in unsafe environment like a car they are driving. Of course, that still leaves the possibility that a passenger/accomplice might open it.
OK, I guess I’m regretting the “crazy” comment. I don’t fundamentally disagree with y’all. And agreed, this isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) political. Good luck with that…
Interesting. The backstory to his glitter bombs is that someone stole a package from his porch and he gave the po-po the video, but they didn’t do anything about it (not a high enough priority or something). So maybe it depends on what state he’s in. I would guess California. Wikipedia confirms.
Never underestimate the power of being startled.
This would be my (non-lawyer, clueless of the law) take. I can’t see how he’d be liable for someone taking a package and then opening it themselves.
I love his videos btw…always anticipate the next generation of packages. He’s been doing this for years and, afaik, no one has tried to sue him.
ETA: BTW, he is fairly rich, so my thought here is if someone COULD sue him, he would have been sued. That seems to me to be pretty good evidence that such a suit wouldn’t pay off, though perhaps no one has been in a bad accident due to one of his packages yet…
But notice that you didn’t veer off into oncoming traffic or cause some other type of accident. You heard a noise that’s common, and to a point, expected, while driving and you acted appropriately. A car horn is another such noise that’s common to hear while driving and a lawyer may argue that a reasonable person would (or should) react to it in a similar fashion. Granted, a car horn going off in your car is going to be a helluva a lot louder. So maybe the argument wouldn’t work. Also, even if it could be argued that the car horn shouldn’t cause an accident, the glitter is a whole other issue.
Maybe in Glitter Bomb 5.0, Mark could add an accelerometer or GPS (or tap into one of the phones accelerometers or GPS) and have something that locks the box while it’s in motion. I think most people, upon not being able to get it open, would wait until they’re parked and/or out of the car to try it again on the assumption that there’s some tape or something that needs to be cut. I always thought it was odd when they reached over and opened an Apple branded box that didn’t have any kind of seal on it.
I’m willing to bet that part of that is because (I’m assuming) no one got into an accident and suing him would require an admission of stealing an expensive item. I assume the Glitter Bomb is worth considerably more than that what’s pictured on the box. Even ignoring all work and custom fabricated parts, it has four iPhones in it.
Also, the fact that he hasn’t been sued could also be due to things being settled before a suit is filed. If a “victim” gets a lawyer, a simple letter from Mark’s team offering them $x and requiring them to not speak of it again, might be enough to make them go away.
How does this entire discussion compare with the discussion of mailbox baseball? The mailbox booby-trapper doesn’t (presumably) foresee that the perps are going to get hurt, and if they do it’s their own malfeasance to blame, right? Right?
While I enjoyed the comedy aspect of the glitter bomb, I think that it would be more appropriate to create a fake parcel with an apparently high-value, but non-functioning item in it - a laptop would be ideal.
A concealed device could let the owner know that the parcel has been moved and transmit its location. Once the laptop is opened, the camera could be triggered to send pictures of the thief. This, together with the location, should be sufficient to apprehend the culprit(s), assuming that the local police could be persuaded to take action.
I suppose you could be accused of entrapment, but I doubt that would be successful.
No, they do. It’s very foreseeable that if you hit a block of concrete at 30 miles an hour, it’s going to hurt you. The while point is to hurt. They may not anticipate how badly it will hurt, but they want to do damage.
I like the squirrel obstacle courses better.
Here in the Dallas area, there used to be little “mugshot” newspapers at convenience stores. For $1, it was every mugshot they could get from the police, published. Shaming aside, I worked with a guy who said his brother-in-law had gotten a DUI and it would have cost him his job if his employer found out about it. He basically had to pay the rag not to publish it.
In the youtube video that Nars posted, he says near the end that the po-po in SF are fans and they tried to catch the perps. Rober plans to work with them next year.
Well, no. In this instance, a package is left on someone’s porch. It is not intended for the people who live in the house. It is intended for someone to steal it, and intended to startle and (lightly) punish that person, isn’t it?
Can you steal something that someone deliberately leaves to be taken by any random person?
ETA: The more I think about the legality of what he’s doing, the more I think it prolly is or at least should be illegal.
Just to add, I enjoy Mark Rober vs the squirrels and bird feeders.
I think Mr. Rober totally fucking rocks; I was subscribed to his channel long before Glitter Bomb. But the AirBnB video bothered me. That poor guy’s house was glittered for absolutely no reason. He was okay with it at the time, but what about in 2 years when he’s still eating glitter? And why should he have had to deal with all that in the first place?
I’m wondering if legally this is akin to our discussion of if you are liable if you “booby trap” re: hidden reinforcement of your mailbox and injure someone vandalizing it.
I asked a few lawyers I know about this. With the caveat that this isn’t the type of law they do, most of them were actually unsure of the legalities. Things they pointed out were the cops are aware of this going on, and at least as far as they can tell, hadn’t asked him to stop or warned him it was a criminal violation of any kind…so, as far as criminal law, he’s probably ok (lots of caveats and, frankly, a lot of stuff I didn’t fully comprehend).
On the civil side, they thought it would be possible for him to be liable if there was a serious accident, though they couldn’t think of any case law that would show this one way or another (none of them deal with this sort of thing though, so that’s fairly meaningless from what I understand). It would probably hinge on the jury and whatever law(s) were in force. One of them talked about a case where a car thief stole a car with bad tires that the owner had deliberately put on. The thief crashed the car due to the tires and tried to sue. The outcome of the case, however, wasn’t known to the lawyer who just kind of shrugged sheepishly…but, depending on how cases like that have played out would impact anyone trying to sue Rober.
I still find it hard to believe that if someone steals something like this and chooses to open it while driving that Rober would be liable, but the law is a strange thing. I guess this is the sort of thing that keeps bread and skittles on lawyers tables.
A Florida law firm did a post on this subject:
I’m not even sure how to summarize it, largely because they seem to be:
- creating an argument for Rober’s liability (“Civil Liability for Battery”), but then
- offering an exculpatory bit that may nullify that liability (“Defense of Property”).
It just occurred to me: is it legal to infiltrate someone’s house with A/V cameras and record them without their prior permission?
The presumption in the mailbox booby trap thread was that the booby trapper was deliberately trying to injure the mailbox smasher. That was the, ah, “ungrasped distinction” that kept the thread going for so long, between someone installing a strong mailbox because you don’t want to keep replacing it, and installing a strong mailbox that looks weak, so that the next person who smashes it hurts themselves.
Entrapment is a situation where a person is persuaded to commit a crime they otherwise weren’t inclined to commit usually by a government agent or someone acting on their behalf. Police departments set up sting operations where they park vehicles in areas with a lot of theft, wait for someone to come by and try to steal it, and then arrest them and it’s not entrapment. Now if an undercover officer was there telling people how easy it would be to steal the car, then you’d have a case for entrapment.
Nobody’s house is being infiltrated. Those people are willingly bringing an unknown item into their own homes.