SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In August, Milwaukee's Lake Park saw swarms of Pokémon Go players, some of whom trampled and trashed the area, making a general nuisance of themselves. Not everyone behaved badly, as John Dargle, Jr, director of the Milwaukee County Department of Parks, Recreation & Culture, acknowledged in a letter [PDF] at the time. But a subset of thoughtless gamers created enough of a burden that Milwaukee County Supervisor Sheldon Wasserman proposed an ordinance [PDF] to require augmented reality game makers to obtain a permit to use county parks in their apps.
The ordinance was approved and took effect in January. It has become a solution waiting for a problem – according to a spokesperson for Milwaukee County, no game maker has bothered to apply for a permit since then.
[...] Nonetheless, in April, Candy Lab, a maker of augmented reality games based in Nevada, filed a lawsuit "out of genuine fear and apprehension that this ordinance, conceptually and as written, poses a mortal threat not only to Candy Lab AR's new location-based augmented reality game, but also to its entire business model, and, indeed, to the emerging medium of augmented reality as a whole."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday June 10 2017, @09:26PM
You've nailed the distinction. Profit.
There will be some sort of "Fair Use" augmentation to prevent 1st Amendment issues from arising, but any commercial augmentation provider would need to cover the usage fees that their customers cause. No different than parks hosting county fairs and whatnot, or even a private road. If one person starts running a business with 50 people showing up to work each day, they cause 50 more cars to be on the road with the associated wear and tear. Their share of road costs is no longer equal with everyone else.
Causing hundreds of people to enter the park, running around hysterically like idiots, is in fact a usage and resource issue. Organizers need to play by the rules, and when augmented reality is explicitly designed to interact with reality, there is functionally no difference between a real event hosted on public grounds. If the augmented reality is not designed to host events, play games, or as a matter of design entice and reward people for accessing an area, then it should be free to do whatever it wants.
I dunno about some of the points. The bathrooms and parking fees seem to be a bit extreme, but again, that should just conform with what any other organizer would experience in an event like a fair where roads and businesses are impacted. Of course, it would be determined on a local basis.
There is a degree of nuance that is missing here, but the law can evolve to address it. It would be interesting to study it first and determine the impact on public resources before deciding that a law is required. As for the vandalism and other undesirable behavior, enforce existing laws.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.