Niantic wins lawsuit against creators of hacked versions of Pokémon GO

The creators of hacked versions of Pokémon GO and other Niantic mobile titles have agreed to a $USD 5 million settlement, following the conclusion of lawsuit originally filed in a California district court in 2019. As part of this settlement, all parties involved agreed defendants had profited from unauthorized derivative versions of Niantic’s mobile apps, that made use of “substantial portions of Niantic’s copyrighted computer code without Niantic’s permission” and in violation of Niantic's terms of service. These hacked games released by Global++ allowed plays to spoof GPS and have their in-game avatar "auto-walk", amongst other functions.

The final judgement on this lawsuit also grants Niantic a permanent injunction to prevent the hack developers Global++ from further interference with and profiting from Niantic's mobiles games and their server infrastructure, and from developing, marketing, or receiving payment for the hacked apps or substantially similar products. Global++, and their co-defendents, had faced charges violations of the Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, California's Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, California’s Unfair Competition Laws, for their unauthorised access and copying of Niantic’s proprietary code and map data, and subsequently deriving financial benefit from these actions through selling their hacked apps.