Who Owns It?

> who owns it?

You do, unless a claimant's legal team is mightier than your defense team.

Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers

Heard it said possession is 9/10ths of the law. I'm pretty sure the other 1/10th is discretion.

Better question, would you give it back to the rightful owner(s)? or keep your pie hole shut. :-X or :-O

Here's a better question..

If you do find a pot-o-gold...

Are you required to report it as capital gains for the year you found it?

Or, if and when you sell, do you pay taxes on the revenue resulting from said sale?

If I lost something of value (say I dropped my identifiable rolex) and saw you wearing it after I let you on my property, I would probably accuse you of being a thief.

I think if you come on private property and leave with something you didn't own (without permission), I think you are stealing.

Who's to say it's actually "lost"?? Maybe someone knows exactly where it is and doesn't expect anyone to find it. I wouldn't touch it.

The answer is...

... It depends.
With 50 states and as many systems of law, the answer is not a blanket 'finders keepers'. For one, you are talking about a finding on property belonging to another person. Trespassing or not you have entered another persons land and removed something of value (hypothetically of course). This isn't likely to end up in the long and winding road of Civil Courts. You will probably go to jail and face serious charges. Again, 50 States with lots of districts so there are innumerable possibilities.
In Idaho if you owned the land it would boil down to a few questions. We just had a big one on this. A person purchased a home previously occupied by a famous artist. They found a cache of his work. After much thought the Courts eventually turned the art over to the artists family. I didn't see that one coming...

Let's change the question only slightly and see if the answer is clear.

Suppose this "treasure' you find is in the dresser drawer in the guest bedroom of my home. Who owns it?

Yep, pretty easy answer isn't it? My opinion is the answer is the same no matter where you find the treasure. If it is on someone else's land, it belongs to them.

Larry P

"possession is eleven points in the law, and they say there are but twelve."
-Old Scottish saying

In this case you are acting as an agent for someone. I think the law would treat that differently than if you are on some random property at some random time and found something.

As noted above, different rules - different states. And finders keepers ain't always true. I heard of a legal case a while back (not too many years ago) where someone found a ring that was easy to identify who the owner was. Finder wanted to keep it - judge said no.

As a 24-year-old surveyor's apprentice, I spent 6 months or so stomping around the forests of Plumas County retracing 19th century gold mining claims on a USFS contract. It was steep, rough, remote country, and hardly a day went by that I didn't feel like I was walking where no human had walked before. We traversed our way over ridges, across streams and through fallen-down mine works, and pretty much the whole time I dreamed about stumbling onto the cache of some long-dead reclusive miner, tucked into a rock crevice or buried in an obscure hillside. At the end of the job the only monetary wealth I had accumulated came from my $2.50 per hour wage, but I was immeasurably enriched by the experience.

Well of course the land owner would own all the valuables on their land that were not specifically excepted when the land was patented/transferred. Has nothing to do with trespassing and everything to do with ownership.

Mineral rights can be complicated.
I believe in many states, the landowner does not own the mineral estate beneath their property. In other states, where the mineral rights passed to the patentee, even though two adjacent land owners own the mineral estate beneath their land, they both can claim the minerals beneath the each others land, if the initial discovery was on their own land and the lode is well defined running through the adjacent land.

In most places, if you find anything that is not yours, and you do not attempt to find the rightful owner, you are guilty of theft.

Locally here the police ran a sting operation, where they left purses laying around. Someone found the purse and didn't call the police to try and find the rightful owner. They were charged with theft.

The original saying is 'possession is 9 tenets of the law'. I can't recall with certainty but I believe there were 38 tenets related to property and ownership...

“but a long lost or hidden and forgotten cache of nuggets, who owns it?”

Well that’s a silly question assuming you mean these kind:

Ps: Make sure they are genuine imitation compressed poultry byproducts and NOT cow thighs.

B-)

Clyde and Buck would eat'em 😉

Oh Lord, don't talk to me about Cow Thighs

But consider this:

During the Gold Rush in California, before land was surveyed and patented, a happy placer prospector was making his way to a little mining camp in the foothills of the Sierra. It was early evening and he was carrying enough of his days production in nuggets and dust to have a few drinks and to spend some time with a young women who he knew would be working at the settlement.

In his hurry to get to the drinking and whoring, he left the trail that he usually travelled and cut down and across a steep ravine that would save him time, but presented some physical risk because of the ruggedness of the terrain.

Because of his haste and lack of concentration on his immediate situation, he was careless and, most unfortunately, tumbled to his death in a rocky crevasse.

Time passed. Animals and spring floods eventually carried his remains away and all that remained in the area of his passing was his poke. The leather bag that held the projected cost of his anticipated entertainment had been caught on a scrubby, canyon-side growing manzanita as he tumbled to his death. Eventually the leather rotted and the gold within dropped to the base of the brush which, in time, withered, died and was consumed by one of the frequent wildfires that swept the area.

Enter the surveyors. The one in the 1870's that set an original quarter corner within five feet of the miner's long lost and now covered-over gold, and the one who, in diligently searching for the corner 150 years later discovers the hidden gold on what is soon to be Lot 17 of your client's Shady Acres Subdivision.

Again I ask, who owns it.
Note that the last surveyor did not steal your Rolex from your dresser drawer.:-)

Don

The phrase to search for law is "treasure trove."

It may vary by location. At one time the finder had a pretty good claim in most places, but the trend is to give it to the landowner.

After the argument, of course, it goes to the l*wyers.

Regardless of what is legally correct, (or more correctly, what you can get away with within the boundaries of the law), I view myself as a guest of the land owner, as well as an agent of my client. If I were to find anything of value, I would point it out to the landowner if I liked them, or leave it to rot if I didn't.

That being said, I regularly stuff my pockets with pebbles and pine cones, and take home antlers and bones, and happily pluck fresh apples off of trees. I just don't view these as having any substantial value.

So much of our business is our reputation. I imagine word would get out if you are known to have sticky fingers.

During the course of my career, I have found mason jars full of cash, small patches of weed in the woods, potted plants in urban areas, homeless squatters, an antique brass survey instrument still set up inside an abandoned shed (party chief actually asked if he could have that.... No go), and an uncountable amount of small infractions and violations that local police or code guys would love to know about.

In all these scenarios, I am there to do a job. A job that I actually really enjoy, and would like to keep doing. As I said to a pot grower in central California, I have no interest in what you have or do with your deck other than the location of your building corners, deck, and fence.

Live and let be.

When you discover that pot of gold, at the end of the rainbow, you had better plan on splitting it with the leprechaun.

I think the landowner.

Lets say an unsuspecting developer finds a "beautiful," apparently untouched piece of property that he intends to have you convert into Shady Acres subdivision. So he proceeds to mortgage himself to the neck and buy the property. Then he retains you to prepare the subdivision plan set.

During the test pitting phase for subsurface onsite septic designs, the backhoe unearths a stockpile of old rusty barrels with the Radiation symbol on them.

Evidently, the property has sat fallow and then wooded for over 60 years, but someone has been using it as a hazardous waste dump.

Of course, because the town code enforcement officer was there witnessing the test pits, every red flag and cease and decist order they (the town and state) can write is thrown at this guy.

Let me ask you...

Who owns the treasure now!?

Do not seek the trreasure!

:-X