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.
“At least five of them knocked on Marder’s door and asked for access to his backyard”
Weirdos.
Answers the much ado about nothing question. This is a problem. Similar to Google having to obscure faces, license plates, etcetera with Street View.
There is no sticky issue here. Private property means private property.
There is a Pokémon that shows up in my neighbor’s backyard, probably 100 yards from my recliner, and I have no problem getting it. People are just dumb, we can’t fix that with an update.
There is an easy fix: Nintendo apologizes, pays this man, and modifies their game so it is only playable on public property.
Duh.
This is why regular people hate tech people. Not just because a software company made a game that uses their property and time for free, but because when they complain, some blogger says there is no easy fix. Like tech companies just have a right to abuse anyone.
The fix is the easiest thing in the world! Use public property only! Nintendo is being told exactly what to fix right now by their lawyers, whose hair is on fire. Nintendo has exposed themselves to potentially billions of dollars in liability.
Imagine I buy a huge farm and turn it into Lazer Tag, but I later lose the farm and business. I could conceivably pivot to make a Lazer Tag app so people can play Laser Tag in public with their phones, but I certainly could not send the players to that farm I no longer own to play Laser Tag. And if I did, I should expect to get sued for unpaid rent by the current owner. If you use private property for your business, you have to pay. That is fundamental to how the economy works. That is what makes the property “private.”
If you own property, send Nintendo an invoice right now for this month’s use of your property in Pokemon Go. You can set the price at anything you want since they did not arrange a price before they began using your property. They can stop using your property anytime if they don’t want to pay.
What is amazing is how tech companies style themselves as Libertarian, but then constantly steal from the commons, for example using government-funded research but then avoiding paying taxes. But it is quite another kind of amazing to declare some new right to steal the use of private property. It’s like if you woke up one day and found 3 Uber cars parked in your front yard, waiting for fares, and Uber was like, “there’s no easy fix for that.”
What a load of rubbish. Niantic did not place anything on the property, it’s a bunch of virtual bits that they own that happens to use that location. It would be no different from people having a list of cool cubby houses and people showing up asking to look at your cubby house. Sure, it might be nice to be able to ask to have your three story cubby house removed from their list, but you don’t have a right to control other people and what they say, even about you.
Sure, Niantic should (and probably will I expect) have some way to request that Pokemon not appear in certain locations, but that that should not be a legal issue.
And for those who just say “restrict it to public property” – where do you think there is a reliable, accurate, database of all public/private property?
Now, I’m going to go back to ignoring Pokemon and continue Munzee hunting instead (which is actually physical, and which is actually restricted to public property, but which is probably more illegal given the stickers are technically a form of graffiti).