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Shocker: Alamo Drafthouse bans customers from wearing Google Glass to the movies

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It doesn’t come at any surprise, but Alamo Drafthouse — a large American movie theater chain — has decided to implement a company-wide policy banning customers from using Google Glass (via Deadline) once trailers have begun rolling. CEO Tim League just today made the policy official, but he deserves some major respect for the amount of patience he had before making the call on this new technology.

“I decided to put off a decision until we started seeing them in the theater, and that started happening this month,” League told Deadline. He said that the company was talking about a potential ban of the device for a year, and that they recognized the potential piracy problem from the start. That said, League doesn’t completely rule out that the device may one day be removed from the blacklist:

I realize that technology may change and this type of device may eventually become widely adopted and even replace traditional glasses,” he said. “Down the road our policies may have to morph. Given the technology that exists today, however, I decided that banning the device while movies are playing is the best decision for us right now.

It certainly makes sense that movie theaters would have piracy concerns, although it’s worth noting that Google Glass in its current form would be a very poor device to use for the purpose of bootlegging movies; battery life and on-board storage space isn’t exactly the best, and the recording wouldn’t even be high enough in quality to do so well in those darker parts of the internet.

In the meantime, it looks like League is being fairly rational in his approach to this situation. He clarified to Deadline that the policy will only be enforced “on a case by case basis, with consideration to users wearing Google Glass as their primary eyewear.”

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Avatar for Stephen Hall Stephen Hall

Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.