Pokemon Will Discourage Trespassing To Settle Nuisance Class Action

Niantic Inc., the owners of Pokemon, promises to discourage Pokemon Go users from trespassing, as part of a class action settlement.

The company will also encourage game users to “be mindful of their physical surroundings” when playing the game.

The Pokemon Go class action settlement deal doesn’t include monetary benefits for plaintiffs, who are people who claim that they and their property were disturbed by game players chasing after virtual Pokemon characters and seeking out virtual locations in real-world geography.

The plaintiffs note that the provision that would require Niantic to discourage trespassing and disturbing real-world surroundings “is expressly severable from the remainder of the settlement agreement, in the event that the court will not approve the inclusion of this term as part of the settlement.”

Additionally, Niantic agreed to edit the game to respect the opening hours of public parks and other locations, if the settlement deal were to be approved.

The proposed Pokemon class action settlement would also require Niantic to track and process complaints of trespassing and nuisances caused by players of Pokemon Go game.

Niantic promised to create a website to receive the complaints and promised to resolve 95 percent of the complaints filed within 15 days, according to the Pokemon Go class action settlement.

A series of lawsuits, and a subsequent multidistrict litigation, were launched in 2016 against Niantic following the company’s release of the game Pokemon Go.

Owners and renters of property claimed that Niantic encouraged trespassing by placing virtual characters and destinations on a map in the game’s app, and encouraging players to travel to the real-world correlating destination to locate them.

The Pokemon Go class action lawsuits were filed separately and then later consolidated into a multidistrict litigation in California federal court.

Allegedly, some of these virtual features were located on private property, and players were causing nuisance and damage by traipsing through the grounds.

The Pokemon Go class action lawsuit states that in the case of one property owner, “Pokémon Go players trespassed onto her California property after Niantic had designated her swimming pool as a Pokestop or a Pokemon Gym, damaging her lawn and her fence and generally causing a nuisance.”

In 2017 and 2018, Niantic made two separate efforts to have the trespassing multidistrict litigation dismissed. In January 2017, the company argued that it should not be held responsible for the action of people who played the game. This argument proved unsuccessful.

In 2018, U.S. District Judge James Donato rejected another bid to have the Pokemon nuisance multidistrict litigation dismissed, calling the issue “novel and open” enough to warrant continuing to litigate the claims.

According to Judge Donato, there were no clear-cut decisions made by a high court that would clarify if setting objects in a virtual space that correlated to the real world would constitute trespassing if those virtual objects were on private property.

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The property owners and renters are represented by Jeremy A. Lieberman, Murielle J. Steven Walsh, Aatif Iqbal, Patric V. Dahlstrom, and Jennifer Pafiti of Pomerantz LLP.

The Pokemon Go Trespassing Class Action Lawsuits are In re: Pokemon Go Nuisance Litigation, Case No. 3:16-cv-04300, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.