Pokemon Go Gone?
Pokemon Go Gone? - presented by Kasia Jaruzelska
In this week's You Legal TV, we break free of our serious demeanour and hit the biggest trend in town - Pokemon Go. But don't panic - it's not all fun and frivolity. We've found plenty of legal issues to spark your interest. Tune in to find out more.
See below for the complete transcript of this episode -
Hello and welcome to You Legal TV.
Our lawyers here are not ones to shy away from an exploding trend, and Pokemon Go is exactly that. When pressed, some of us will even admit to downloading the groundbreaking app and giving it a whirl, but what had us really excited was the absolute plethora of legal issues that arose from the game. Today, we will look at some of our favourites.
Firstly, intellectual property. One of the interesting things about Pokemon Go is that despite its immense popularity and obvious benefit to brand awareness, it is not a particularly profitable product. There are only minor and completely voluntary opportunities for players to pay money for the game. What is valuable is the intellectual property. Trademarks, copyright and patents are bound. In the US, where copyright is dependent on registration, there are nearly 3,000 copyright registrations associated with Pokemon. The Pokemon trademarks were registered as early as 1997, and since then, Nintendo has filed patents for certain aspects of the game and Pokemon specific filings with be available for viewing next year, so you can have a sneak peek at where augmented reality technology is heading.
Secondly, privacy. The installation of the app required significant amounts of personal information, so much so that Australia's privacy commissioner actually contacted the developers to ensure compliance with the Australian privacy act. There was sound advice that people should read the privacy policies of apps prior to downloading them, but the Atlantic magazine recently calculated that if you were to read every privacy policy you encountered in a year, it would take 76 work days, more than three times the average annual leave allowance. Ain't nobody got that for that, isn't an exaggeration.
Next, work places issues and trespass. Companies, and not just those with young employees, have been forced to issue warnings for their employees not to play the game due to increased risks to health and safety. In New South Wales, if you enter a courtroom to look for Pokemon, you could be heavily fined or even face jail time. Other companies, especially ones with high health and safety risks, have raised issues of trespassing, which leads us to the final issue of product liability.
We have probably rolled our eyes at the good folk that have allegedly fallen off a cliff or crashed their car while playing the game. Could the developers be held responsible for this? Only time will tell. For now, the app’s popularity shows no signs of abating, and while the privacy issue appears to have been resolved with the security patch, it seems that there are still plenty of legal issues to explore with this new phenomenon, and we will be keeping our eyes on all of them.
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* This blog is for general guidance only. Legal advice should be sought before taking action in relation to any specific issues.