A proposed settlement filed last week could give homeowners some control over whether or not Pokémon Go's augmented-reality attractions show up in and around their property.I'm glad this didn't go to trial, since I don't believe it could possibly have been ruled correct, but I still think this settlement is bad. The part about homeowners limiting attractions on their single-family home properties makes sense enough. This should be obvious. But "around" their property is much less defensible to limit.
[...] homeowners will be able to use a Web form to complain about any "points of interest" (i.e., Pokéstops and Gyms) that are within 40 meters of their single-family home.
[...] Public parks will also be able to request that POIs on their grounds be inaccessible outside of that park's posted hours of operation.(https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/niantic-poised-to-settle-pokemon-go-trespassing-complaints/)
I would hate a Pokemon gym being placed on the sidewalk in front of my house, but I don't see how I could rightfully limit such placement. It is a public space. It would be reasonable for a city to pass a loitering law which targets individuals who don't live nearby, making mass usage of such a gym difficult(perhaps enforcement triggered upon complaint of or posting by the nearest homeowner); but to tell neighbors "you can't stand on this spot of sidewalk for a game", exceeds any right I would ever imagine I have.
The situation is even sillier with the after-hours issue of public parks. There is zero difference between someone entering a park after-hours for Pokemon or to make use of a baseball field or playground. The resource is statically placed, it is up to the user to mind the rules. I can't imagine trying to maintain a database of such after-hours exclusions while keeping it accurate to changing hours. A city might update their request when they narrow the hours, but I doubt they'd pro-actively update their request if park hours are widened. Then, if a solution as this were to become standard, it would leave cities in the position of making sure any similar AR-style games are independently limited. We don't need cities having to manage *more* useless paperwork when we *should* expect the burden of following the rules to fall on the users(that burden being the resulting fines when caught blatantly violating the rules).
The article says nothing of businesses. If they really are left out of this plan then that's quite a silly exclusion: public parks get protections but private businesses don't? That's quite reversed.