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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: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday June 10 2017, @09:37PM (3 children)
You mean like establishing the park in the first place? Then building parking lots and sidewalks near it? Then licensing vendors and pay toilets to make park use more pleasant? All to build an Attractive Nuisance!!
So we should prosecute the cities themselves, or the citizens who demanded (and paid for) those parks? Where was their planning? Where was their fences and gates and posted hours and police? How irresponsible!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 10 2017, @10:42PM (2 children)
You seem to be unfamiliar with the notion of the tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org].
As it was once explained by a philosophy professor, let's say you REALLY love to walk around on grass in your bare feet. So you do down to the public park every night, and take off your shoes, and walk around on the grass -- and you enjoy yourself. Fantastic.
Now imagine if every single person in the city went to the park and did the same thing every day. After a couple months, there is no grass left, and thus no resource for ANYONE to enjoy.
Public parks ARE a public resource. But they are designed with specific use cases in mind, including specific volumes of people, specific kinds of events, perhaps specific design issues to either encourage or discourage crowds in certain locations. If you violate those use cases, you may make the park less valuable as a resource for everyone. People DID complain about the crowds created by Pokemon Go. Are all of their complaints about the use of public resources invalid?
So, what does the city have to do if the grass starts to die in the above scenario? It passes regulations over the use of the grass in the parks. That's its right to protect the appropriate use of the park as determined by voters for all citizens of the city. That's what it's doing here. If citizens of the city disagree with the necessity for such permits, let them take that up with their elected representatives.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 11 2017, @12:37AM (1 child)
On the contrary, you are clearly unfamiliar with it. This has NOTHING to do with that.
There exists no commons in modern cities. Certainly not American cities. BLM lands are the closest example in the US, but even those lands have usage regulations.
The parks are already maintained by city government, with regulations and a budget and a maintenance staff, and hours of operation, and police patrols. NOTHING at all like the tragedy of the commons.
Stay in school!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:41PM
Etymological fallacy combined with a variant of No True Scotsman.