Have you ever looked up into the sky at some piece of skywriting and thought “hey, is that even remotely legal to write up there?”
Well, you might be surprised to learn that you can write whatever you goddamn want on the sky and no-one can stop you. Provided, that is, that you can find someone to do it.
This is a helpful thing to know, courtesy of the Conversation which was specifically looking at whether it fell under the constraints of political advertising – and the answer in a nutshell is “nup”.
The law, as it stands, compares politically motivated skywriting to graffiti, which is not especially helpful since graffiti is illegal.
One reason for the lack of laws is that up until now there have been precious few skywriters operating, which has incidentally also meant that would-be sky authors have been occasionally thwarted by the personal politics of the pilots.
For example: during the horrific same sex marriage “respectful debate” several vote no messages were sprayed over Sydney, but the Yes campaign were rebuffed when the only pilot in the state refused the job.
However, that’s all likely to change because of technology.
What’s very exciting is that soon skywriting could be done by drones – swarms of them at once, doing one or two letters apiece, so that the end of the message might still be up there before the beginning had blown into illegibility.
So this means a couple of things. One, that the skies will soon be a disgusting mish-mash of competing slogans, and two, that you can expect laws on drone swarms and message content rushed into existence shortly thereafter.
In the meantime, it’s broadly legal to write whatever you want up there in the community sky. As long as you can convince that pilot, we assume.