Google Glass Seen As Piracy Gadget Inside Movie Theatres

Google Glass apparently is not seen as a great advancement in technology that should freely roam on everybody’s head by many people. There was a case where a woman has been pulled over and fined for wearing Google Glass while driving, though no regulation has been made for this, on top of the glasses being turned off while she was driving. The court even gave its consent in regard to Google Glass, since the gadget can be seen as a useful hands-free tool. But the more recent case involves a man going to the cinema with a pair of Google Glass, which ended badly for him and his wife.

The couple, for Columbus – Ohio, bought tickets for the Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit at a local AMC movie theatre and went in to watch it. Nothing out of the ordinary here, but the man was wearing his pair of Google Glass, and although the device was turned off during the movie, that did not stop the police from grabbing the man and his wife and escorting them outside, where they were greeted by other fellow mall cops and the FBI.

“About an hour into the movie, a guy comes near my seat, shoves a badge that had some sort of shield on it, yanks the Google Glass off my face and says ‘follow me outside immediately’. It was quite embarrassing and outside of the theater there were about 5-10 cops and mall cops,” the man said in an interview. “You see all these cops, you know we are legit, we are with the ‘federal service’ and you have been caught illegally taping the movie,” he was told.

The man said that the feds asked him questions about everything from how much money he made, to how many computers he owned. The questioning got weirder when they began asking questions about Google itself. They wanted to know what information Google ask for in exchange for Glass, how much the company was paying him, and who his boss is that is making him record movies in theaters. The feds went as far as to tell the man who even though he was detained, the interview was voluntary and that if he refused to cooperate, bad things may happen to him.

If this is the kind of security and events we should expect to see in the future when Google Glass will finally launch, I don’t think many will have the courage of bringing them outdoors. And implicitly, such events will even have a big negative impact on the Google Glass marketing as well.