Legal Geek No. 80: Pokemon Go and a Myriad of Legal Issues

Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we join the Pokemon Go craze of the past few weeks with a brief look at all the interesting legal questions the popular application and its certain knock-off competitors will raise.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp80

The first legal concern of Pokemon Go has largely been dealt with by the developer, that being privacy settings which were way more than necessary for running the software. Originally access to your entire Google account had to be granted to play on some platforms, and that would raise serious potential liability concerns for the company maintaining and accessing that data. However, this is one issue that played out quickly with a settings fix.

There's already videos and stories of players being transfixed in their phones and walking into roads or other dangerous situations. That raises a question of whether there could be any legal liability for putting digital Pokemon in places that lure people into dangerous areas. The risks get even worse in different contexts like playing while driving. The game's terms of service disclaim all liability for such things, but would it stand up in court? That's an open question.

Another issue is placement of Pokemon or gyms in the locations of private property and businesses. A property owner could hypothetically argue that this creates an attractive nuisance by drawing unwanted people to the property, and it also negatively affects the owner's interests in exclusive possession of the property. Can real property rights be used to claim property rights in augmented reality digital elements placed on the property by a third party like this game developer? I expect someone will try such claims in court if annoyed enough.

There's also the problem of potential competition for public spaces between Pokemon Go users who may be congregating at a digital gym and others who want to use the public property like a park for other purposes it was designed for. It would be interesting to see if the government could constitutionally limit Pokemon Go in certain public properties. Some prison operators certainly think so, but that's a slightly different context.

The Bottom Line is, the law always takes time to catch up with technology fads and movements, as discussed for the CFAA last week. But Pokemon Go raises far more interesting legal questions potentially than you might originally think when you begin playing the game.

Now excuse me while I go catch this Charmander...or maybe it's Justin Robert Young, who knows?

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Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy

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