Re: You don't own the air above your ground
"Now I could be very mistaken, but as I see it mining always involves significant ground-level activities (huge holes, trucks, specialized building most of the time); it totally makes sense that you'd have to pay the landlord for that.
You'll find that miners also have to get a (costly) permit from the State, often with very well-defined quotas (just ask them). Just as if the underground stuff belonged to the State, innit?"
Permit fees and quotas are for environmental reasons due to the pollution mining tends to produce (West Virginia and Italy are intimately familiar with tailings dam failures). But if you don't believe me about the leases, they did a brief television series about a coal mining company (called appropriately "Coal"), and one of the late dramas of the series was that their current lease was not much more usable (their claim ran into an old mine—one that was flooded), so the mining company had to renegotiate their lease with the landowner (and it was specifically a lease—five years) so as to change their claim and turn 90 degrees from their current position.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
