‘It is illegal to record in a movie theater.’

Which. He. Wasn’t. Doing.

How many times does this need to be repeated, he was not recording anything, and if they really had a problem with him wearing the device(which are built into his regular glasses) into the theater they should have told him so before ever selling him a ticket, not sold him the tickets, let him enter and sit down to watch the movie and then call the copyright cops to drag him from the theater mid-film.

At most they thought he might have been making a recording(a crappy one, that no-one would ever want to watch. Seriously, it would be essentially an entire movie composed of shaky cam shots, you’d have to be a complete masochist to want to watch something like that), and if so they should have politely explained their concerns, and asked him to leave.

‘They were well within their rights to call the authorities if they suspect someone breaking the law in their establishment.’

Which would be one thing, except that’s not what happened. The ones the movie theater contacted were the MPAA, and they then contacted their buddies/employees at ICE to go ‘pirate hunting’.

To try and put this in perspective, and take the copyright angle and any related bagged from it out of the picture, imagine the following scenario:

You’re one of those people that likes to wind down with a drink or two once the weekend hits. Come friday, you go to the supermarket to pick up some drinks, they sell you your items, and you leave. Unknown to you however, due to a ‘bounty’ that’s been placed by a private organization, offered to those that spot and point out drunk drivers, someone at the store calls in said organization and tells them about your purchase, on the assumption that because you just purchased alcohol, and you’re driving a vehicle, of course that means you’re going to be downing a few drinks while driving.

The private organization then calls their buddies at the local precinct and you soon find yourself ‘unofficially’ pulled over, taken somewhere, and interrogated for several hours, where they constantly press you to ‘fess up’ about how much you’d been drinking. While you’re told that you’re not officially under arrest, and are free to leave at any time, it is strongly implied that things will go very poorly for you if you decide to leave.

To you of course this is completely insane, you hadn’t cracked open a single one of those drinks at this point, and so you object strongly, asking, almost pleading with them to allow you to show them the case of drinks, to show that it hadn’t even been opened yet, and to give you a breathalyzer test to show that you hadn’t touched a drop of the stuff, and yet for whatever reason they refuse, and continue interrogating you for several hours.

Finally, at some point, one of them gets the bright idea to check the packages themselves, and lo and behold the containers/boxes are still closed up, not a single drink out of place. Then they give you the breathalyzer test you’d been asking for during the whole mess and it comes up completely clean as well.

Finally, as though to add insult to injury, a representative from that ‘Private organization’, the one who put out the bounty offer, shows up and explains that it’s all been a terrible misunderstanding, but since the problem they’re trying to deal with is so serious*, obviously you must agree that a ‘little mistake’ like this is a small price to pay, right?

Then, to ‘make it up to you’, rather than actually apologizing for anything that happened, the rep offers you a $5 gift card for the store you made the purchase at, upping it to a $10 gift card when you refuse such a cheap ‘repayment’ for all that they’ve put you through.

That even begin to sound like a rational or even sane response to what was nothing more than a suspicion that someone might be breaking the law?

‘I am more concerned with the potential to abuse privacy rights by these devices then a potential stunt to get people to talk about $3,000 glasses and where people should and shouldn’t wear them.’

Please tell me you’re not buying into Blue’s insane idea that this entire thing was a publicity stunt orchestrated by google to promote an upcoming product? I’d expect such idiotic PR from MS, sure(see: the entire XBone PR campaign), but ‘Wear our Glasses, and you too can get dragged from a theater and threatened by the hollywood copyright cops!’ is anything but good PR.

Now, that said, while I highly doubt this was a PR stunt on Google’s behalf, I can totally see it as being an attempted one, and one that backfired badly, on behalf of the AA’s, to ‘make an example’ out of a movie pirate, and show just what happens to those recording movies. The fact that the one they snagged wasn’t actually recording a thing though, kinda makes that ‘example’ dead opposite of what they wanted, making them look all kinds of bad and prone to extreme over-reactions.

Here I should point out that while drunk driving is a serious problem, and deserves extremely harsh punishments to dissuade people from doing so, copyright infringement doesn’t even come close to as damaging as the *AA’s would like to have people believe, and the fact that they have to constantly lie to ‘convince’ people shows that even they know this.