Pokemon Go’s legal entanglements continue today as Niantic has been ordered to appear before a court in the Netherlands on October 11th. The California-based developer is accused of failing to comply with a Dutch government request to remove pokemon from Kijkduin’s environmentally protected beaches and dunes, which the Dutch say have been swarmed with thousands of people hunting the critters. The municipality would also like pokemon banned from the streets from 11 p.m. at night to 7 a.m. in the morning.
According to The Guardian, the Dutch authorities in The Hague claim Niantic has not complied with their requests, which began last month, so they “had no other choice” but to take the games developer to court to seek relief.
This isn’t the first time an international government has demanded Niantic remove pokemon from unwelcome areas. To date, the French education minister wants them removed from campuses; the mayor of Bressolles, France, made demands to remove them from his town; the Sydney, Australia, suburb besieged by players did get at least one of the stops removed; and Japan successfully convinced Niantic to remove the critters from memorial parks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (though not the stops near the dangerous Fukushima reactor). Cambodia simply outlawed playing the game near its Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, while the Bosnian government scrambled to prevent players from chasing pokemon on abandoned minefields.
Here in the US, at least two private citizens are suing the company for allegedly encouraging trespassing on their property, and New York governor Andrew Cuomo went so far as to demand Niantic block registered sex offenders from playing and remove pokemon near to said offenders’ residences.
