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Frugal wrote:

Lets say you lived next to a crack house and people kept ODing on your lawn, do you blame only the addicts or the dealer next door too?

There's a reason why selling crack is a criminal complaint.

To the point where it completely supersedes any civil recovery, even (however theoretical) direct relief.

Frugal wrote:

Lets say you lived next to a crack house and people kept ODing on your lawn, do you blame only the addicts or the dealer next door too?

The difference, of course, being that crack is illegal.

Trespassing is illegal too.

Frugal wrote:

Trespassing is illegal too.

By your logic, Frisbees, basketballs, footballs, etc. should be illegal because you might accidentally throw one onto someone else's lawn, and thereby be encouraged to trespass in order to retrieve it.

Frugal wrote:

Trespassing is illegal too.

But making a game isn't. You can't make this kind of false equivalence between Niantic making an app and the house next door selling crack.

Frugal wrote:

Lets say you lived next to a crack house and people kept ODing on your lawn, do you blame only the addicts or the dealer next door too?

I dare you to actually try Pokemon Go then tell me how it in ANY WAY WHAT SO EVER encourages you to trespass.

yogibbear has a good point. This morning while I was out walking around, I was able to capture creatures in the backyard across the street without even walking outside. There's a huge range on what you can capture.

Glorious wrote:

The civil liability in your example stems from how you deliberately made a false statement with the direct intention of causing a specific individual harm. Not even merely foreseeable, as inflicting harm is the only reason you said that.

Ah, but I only said it was a rumor, and I never encouraged people to actually enter the property. Aren't you conceding that (a) people would act on that information and (b) harm would come to the property owner? I mean, maybe they would just knock on his front door and ask permission to enter the yard, sure...

just brew it! wrote:

Frugal wrote:

Trespassing is illegal too.

By your logic, Frisbees, basketballs, footballs, etc. should be illegal because you might accidentally throw one onto someone else's lawn, and thereby be encouraged to trespass in order to retrieve it.

If Nintendo kept throwing frisbees on my property I think I could sue them to stop.

If it's little Johnnie from two doors down, different story but mostly because you would have to sue little Johnnie's parents and suing neighbors is kind of a last resort.

I have heard of a neighbor lawsuit like that which was successful for the plantiff but it involved an autistic child (not the savant kind) who was terrorizing the neighborhood children and their family was eventually forced to move. That one was more about protecting their children than any animosity against the child's parents.

ludi wrote:

Ah, but I only said it was a rumor, and I never encouraged people to actually enter the property.

It wasn't a rumor, and encouraging people to enter the property was the direct purpose of the post.

The courts aren't run by idiots.

ludi wrote:

Aren't you conceding that (a) people would act on that information and (b) harm would come to the property owner?

You mean that I'm "conceding" that malicious intent solely directed at harming a specific person is a completely different sort of situation altogether, and that the courts are able to suss that out?

My complaint against you would allege that this "rumor" originated with you and no one else, and that you said it falsely and with the sole intent to inducing others to harm me. Even then, it would face a very high bar. When Amway started all the rumors of P&G's satanism, it took decades to work itself out it was actually filed under the unfair competition laws, not generic nuisance or unjust enrichment.

This is why I wondering if anyone has even tried to sue craigslist for the case in which fraudulent "free house, take everything, even the doors!" craigslist ads that resulted in actual property destruction.

ludi wrote:

I mean, maybe they would just knock on his front door and ask permission to enter the yard, sure...

To start with, pokeman players are engaging in solely virtual activity that only happens to be partially overlaid over the real world. While it might induce trespassing, it doesn't involve irreversibly disturbing land or trying to steal (or at *best* wildcat "prospect" mine) an extremely valuable real-life resource.

The way I look at it people have property rights for land that they own and augmented reality is attaching digital objects to a physical place which could be considered very similar to graffiti.

At the very least I believe property owners should have the ability to opt out.

Frugal wrote:

The way I look at it people have property rights for land that they own and augmented reality is attaching digital objects to a physical place which could be considered very similar to graffiti.

It's a good thing you don't write laws then, because if I'm wearing google glasses and append "angry old man screaming GET OFF MY VIRTUAL LAWN" over your house to remind myself (or my friends too if we have a shared space), that's not graffiti, that's flagrant free speech.

Frugal wrote:

At the very least I believe property owners should have the ability to opt out.

By forcibly opting-in to other people's ACTUAL property? Yeah, NO.

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Augmented reality is a red herring, because the issue here isn't the absurd illusion of compositing a graphic over a live camera, but rather how they've made a set of coordinates meaningful in way you don't want. That's the problem, and that's not only difficult to distinguish from any number of other applications, but many of those other applications are far more problematic.

I've said it before, but yelp is literal graffiti in which I can write "this place sucks" over your place of business and directly and purposefully harm you, something which is their entire business model. They assign "digital objects" (reviews) to "physical places", in fact, it's ALL they do.

You can harp on "augmented reality" angle all you like as a fig leaf, but an optional feature in which yelp will automatically warn you (without you querying) when you enter an establishment with a really bad review fits that just fine, but still isn't remotely the heart of the issue, is it?

Frugal wrote:

The way I look at it people have property rights for land that they own and augmented reality is attaching digital objects to a physical place which could be considered very similar to graffiti.

At the very least I believe property owners should have the ability to opt out.

You obviously are going to continue to post in this thread with ZERO idea on how pokemon go works. Pro-tip: you can remove the offending pokestop/gym, and 99.9999999999999999999999999% of them are on public land. The other 0.000000000000000000000000000001% are accessible without trespassing.

Actually the vast majority of the ones I see are at religious institutions, which aren't exactly public land. Still, they're accessible from the street/sidewalk and you never have to step on the property to get them. We actually drive by a bunch and my daughter gets them for me.

note: I live in a town of 30,000. If I lived in a real-life urban area I'm sure there'd be more.

Glorious wrote:

My complaint against you would allege that this "rumor" originated with you and no one else, and that you said it falsely and with the sole intent to inducing others to harm me. Even then, it would face a very high bar.

For the sake of a productive discussion, let's skip past the part where you decided you knew exactly how to judge my motives in the example. Maybe I'm a history buff, and there are records of a stagecoach robbery and abandoned treasure in the area where you live. And after comparing notes, I conclude some probable locations and I post an ad offering maps of those locations to fellow history buffs. Your backyard and Krogoth's both made the list. You suffer a stream of trespassers as a direct consequences. Absent clear evidence of malice, what are the civil implications?

ludi wrote:

For the sake of a productive discussion, let's skip past the part where you decided you knew exactly how to judge my motives in the example. Maybe I'm a history buff, and there are records of a stagecoach robbery and abandoned treasure in the area where you live. And after comparing notes, I conclude some probable locations and I post an ad offering maps of those locations to fellow history buffs. Your backyard and Krogoth's both made the list. You suffer a stream of trespassers as a direct consequences. Absent clear evidence of malice, what are the civil implications?

A less romantic example. A geology club spends their time conducting sonar surveys and discovers that there may be, with reasonable probability, oil deposits under a couple of their neighbors' properties. In this scenario, due to natural bedrock formation, the probable oil beds are inaccessible from the surface except through the surface of the middle of said neighbors' properties. Being geological survey hobbyists, they post this on a related publicly-accessible forum that they also serve and moderate (own) and generate a some ad revenue from. Is the person who posted the information responsible for the person who took it upon themselves to set up a drilling rig without permission in the middle of the neighbors back yard? Implausible you say? All the easily accessible oil in America has already been found and even if not, no one would publicly share such info? Well how about:

Serviceable and reasonably functional jetpacks have finally just been invented. Three people in your city win a draw to be the first to own prototype jetpacks. Jetpacks magazine publishes a story about them. Jetpack enthusiast show up in small crowds in the area in hopes of catching a glimpse of them in use. Some of the dimmer ones wonder around on the private properties. Should Jetpacks magazine be sued for nuisance? But again, an unrealistic example because such jetpacks don't exist, you say? Well then:

A more romantic example. A popular recording artist releases a song with not-so-vague childhood references to the first place he/she had a special romantic encounter, extolling the romantic virtues of the particular spot (eg, "the way the moon filtered through a particular copse of trees and was reflected in their sweethearts eyes..."). The particular song is on an album released for sale. Teenage fans everywhere talk about venturing to make out with their own sweeties in the same location, which now happens to be part of private property. A few trespass to do so. I suppose the artist should obviously have done their homework, determined that this property was now privately owned and never released the song in order to save the current owner any chance of ensuing damages from trespassers?

Suits in cases where there are clear laws against the immediate act causing the damages (ie, trespassing is usually illegal) are pretty much always frivolous, or at least should be. Otherwise, the consequences, if taken to extreme, are frightening, and doesn't ring of much hope for the human race.

And if someone is a little upset that a current fad has resulted in sudden clusters of nerds clumping near their property, resulting in the chance of intermittent minor disturbance where there was none before, in my opinion, as long as the disturbance is within reasonable limits (again, no trespassing or even noise bylaws broken), then these people should probably just learn to live with it. There is a pub almost across the street from the house I am currently living in. Recently they've started having live bands perform on Saturdays. This didn't happen when I moved in. Occasionally, depending on the performer, I can hear the music whilst trying to sleep, resulting in a minor nuisance. I should probably get on with the lawsuit already.

cynan wrote:

Wow.

The class action lawsuit equivalent of "GET OFF MA LAWN!"

Isn't it glorious?