IDG News Service:

A lawsuit in a federal court raises the ticklish issue of whether a company can be hauled to court because its augmented reality game places coveted fantasy creatures and in-game benefits in private property without permission.

Jeffrey Marder, a resident of West Orange, New Jersey, found in the days after the release of the successful augmented reality game Pokémon Go, that strangers, phone in hand, had begun lingering outside his home.

At least five of them knocked on Marder’s door and asked for access to his backyard to catch and add to their virtual collections of the Pokémon images, superimposed over the real world, that the game developer had placed at the residence without his permission.

No easy fix here. If this lawsuit is allowed to go forward, Niantic is going to have a thorny problem to solve. The database they rely on is incredibly large and complex. I can’t imagine it will be easy to excise all the private property from the map. And, if they do, will they replace those gyms and pokéstops? Or will the game get more sparsely populated?

Is this much ado about nothing? Not sure. But if the lawsuit does gain some teeth, I can definitely see lots of folks jumping on the bandwagon.