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posted by takyon on Saturday June 10 2017, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the full-life-consequences dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @03:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @03:36AM (#523682)

    Since the makers of the AR game are the ones making money from those extra 20,000 visitors, there's a reasonable argument that they should be the ones paying the costs.

    The game makers are not making money because people are going to the park. This free game is basically a map application with virtual "critters" that pop up randomly anywhere the player happens to be and can be "captured". The fact that players wander into a park is no different than the players walking into the street or into a mall parking lot or into a corn field.

    The game does not guide them to any specific location. The players are basically holding a virtual divining rod that responds to these randomly appearing characters/tokens.