Legal Question in Administrative Law in California

Re: claims

Forever.

Re: claims

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking when you say "its no longer there." That is a metaphysics question, not a law question! It will be there until someone takes it somewhere else, or until there's no "there" there.

Possibly you are asking if ownership passes from the owner to the person providing the temporary storage. Unless the person providing the storage is in the storage business, the repair business, the consignment sale business, the hotel-and-inn business, or was the landord of the owner, the rule is very simple. Never.

However, a person caught having to store stuff for someone else isn't stuck with having to store it forever, either. First, while the homeowner has the laptop (or other property), they have a so-called "slight" duty of care. That means they can't leave it in the driveway or in the rain, but just putting it in a drawer and letting the battery run down is probably OK.

When the kindly homeowner who's storing your laptop runs out of patience and wants to end the storage, he must notify you, and give you a reasonable opportunity to come and get it.

When the owner in such a situation fails to "come and get it" the obligation of storage ends. The homeowner can dispose of the other guy's stuff (laptop, old furniture, miscellaneous junk, whatever) in a commercially-reasonable manner. If it's really junk, he can take it to the dump; that would be reasonable in those circumstances. For valuable items, however, "reasonable" really means by sale in an arms-length transaction for a fair value, e.g an eBay auction.

Keep in mind that ownership NEVER passes to the homeowner and when valuable property is turned into cash, the cash belongs to the guy whose laptop got sold, not the homeowner who stored it.

The above illustrates a general principle; "reasonable" handling of the ending of keeping someone's laptop might even include a duty to offer to ship it (at the owner's expense, of course) or to drop it off at his office, etc.

The law is pretty stuffy about allowing someone to lose ownership of personal property. There's no equivalent of adverse possession.