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French town wants to bid adieu to Pokemon Go

The village of Bressolles isn't tickled by the augmented-reality game's cast of virtual characters.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
Edward Moyer
2 min read
Paris would appear to be more tolerant of the digital critters.

Paris would appear to be more tolerant of the digital critters.

Edward Berthelot/Getty Images

A French village is saying "non!" to Pokemon Go.

The mayor of Bressolles, a town of about 800 near Lyon, has sent a decree to Niantic Labs, developer of the augmented-reality game, demanding that it stop setting up virtual characters in the town, reports the Associated Press.

Pokemon Go is, of course, the wildly popular, headline-grabbing game that prompts players to explore the real world and monitor their phone screens for virtual creatures that pop up in actual locales.

Mayor Fabrice Beauvois says the game puts pedestrians and drivers at risk and can become a "dangerous addiction" for players, the AP reports.

"When a cafe or a restaurant owner wants to open a business in any French town, they have an obligation to request prior authorization to the mayor," Beauvois told the AP. "The rule applies to all people wishing to set up an activity or occupy a space on a public property. So it applies to Niantic as well, even though their settlement is virtual."

Niantic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Beauvois said Bressolles is the first French municipality to issue such a decree. But he and his village aren't the only ones with reservations about the game and its players.

Earlier this month, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum became Pokemon-free after the institutions asked Niantic to evict the game's characters from the premises. The game has also been banned in Iran, due to unspecified security concerns, and it's been involved in reports of erratic driving, armed robberies and even trampled lawns.

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