Increasingly, though, drone start-ups have found themselves on a collision course with a centuries-old profession: land surveyors. As most people would understand it, “surveying†involves establishing legal boundaries between tracts of land. But some surveying boards have taken a far more expansive view: they maintain that simply collecting and disseminating information about land (dimensions, shape, and size, for example) is the “practice of surveying†and unlawful without a full-blown land-surveyor license. This puts many small-business drone companies in direct violation of state laws.
