ABSTRACT
An easement owner may not make an unauthorized use of the burdened land. The owner of the burdened land had no intention, express or implied, to create the easement in the first place, but rather simply failed to object to an unauthorized use for the prescriptive period. Among the various interests that can encumber land, servitudes use the language of burden and its correlative, benefit most extensively. The concept of burden is also critical for identifying the land benefited by an appurtenant easement. The court found that the easement owner had reasonably relied on the servient estate owner's silence during the easement owner's expenditure of a considerable sum of money, a rather conventional estoppel argument. The manner, frequency, and intensity of the use may change over time to take advantage of developments in technology and to accommodate normal development of the dominant estate or enterprise benefited by the servitude.
