these things and OTHER things will become so common in the end that nobody will care.
Or perhaps the outcome of their becoming common will be the same as happened to TV licenses, and to 27Mhz CB radios (in Australia)?
When I was a kid, if you had a Television, you had to pay a license fee to the government, and there were vans driving around the streets with directional aerials on that could detect the emissions of a television inside the house they were driving past. Once televisions became too common to enforce the legislation, they gave up and changed the legislation to do away with TV licenses.
When I was a teenager, 27Mhz CB radios became all the craze here, because they were legal in the US, and legal to import into Australia, and were dirt cheap - but illegal to use by the average person. Our legislation at that time restricted use of the 27Mhz band to ham radio operators, and they had to pass an exam in order to get their license. In spite of the legislation, the 27Mhz band became so cluttered with CB conversation that it was almost unusable - so the government gave up and legalised 27Mhz band use for CB while they worked on a better solution. A few years later they came up with a scheme to use higher frequencies for CB use, so that range was limited and thus more people could be on the same channel at the same time, and they legislated 27Mhz illegal again and created the new Australian CB band, with 40 channels.
With the price of quadcopters down where it is now, and sure to fall even further as production runs get bigger as the market grows, the government will face the same issues with quadcopters as they did with television licenses and CB radios. They'll have to legislate, and the legislation will have to take into account the number of people using them; and the vast bulk of those people will not be able to be informed of tight restrictions upon their use of the quadcopter. How do they do that? Make restrictions like FlySafe mandatory if the quadcopter is to be sold in this country? Difficult, because you can buy them off the internet. To make that idea work the government would have to work directly with and get full cooperation from all quadcopter manufacturers.
Personally I think the present legislation (and the accompanying Regulations) is reasonable, but it's unworkable for the masses unless, at a bare minimum, the government publishes the information we need to know in order to comply with the legislation ON THEIR WEBSITE! I can't even extract the required information out of the relevant department by email! I've tried three times, to two different sections of the department! And NOBODY there has even done me the courtesy of replying! If you don't hold a pilot's license, they don't want to know you! We're required to abide by their legislation, but they won't give us the information we need to know in order to abide by their legislation!
Gripe over. Thanks for your help, everyone.
Falco