awesome.

Everything else aside, what's also flawed is that even if night vision were possible it would work.

a) there would be enough glasses to cover the 7000 movie theaters, the 8 average screens per theater, the 5 showings per screen a day. Night vision still isn't cheap and theaters are already having enough competition from DVD's ironically.

b) a 16 year old is going to watch/care about ejecting people, I've had a few kids who had problems with the trivial in comparison of collecting and tearing tickets stubs for groups of people. They expect them to operate a high tech goggles? How bout an extra $20 to bribe the kids, it's more than they make in a day.

c) cameras are going to be easily seen. In a crowded theater, with tons of people wearing glasses, coats, handbags, drinks. a 1" piece of glass in a forest of heads and chairs is impossible to see, especially with the limited resolution of the night goggles displays.

d) night vision is not particularly suited for varying light conditions..like most movies.

e) 2 people with cellphones could easily relay when the person with the googles were coming in and watch it multiple times and piece it together. This is almost a dare/challenge to engineering type peeeps..I'm not into it, but the challenge would make it fun.

f) this approach is only good as it's weakest theater. Pirates will find the one

One problem I see with bubblegeneration's analysis is that the risk of getting a lemon is trivial if the product is free.

Some friend leaves it at your house, and says, oh, yeah, that, you can keep it if you want.

No, I was just thinking of how someone could acquire an actually free movie.

In terms of the piracy argument, this can only apply for someone who, say, downloads a good copy and than gives it to many friends (this being truly free for friends, and possibly negligable for pirater, in terms of download time and cd burning or such).

I guess I'd say sharing and giving such things are free for the receiver if the original giver has gotten use out of it. (Because that person has already gotten the use in return for the cost, and thus it is passed on cost free, to others who may have otherwise paid in one way or another for the use.)

With dramatically falling bandwidth costs and HDDs selling in most cases for less than a buck a gig, it's close enough to free to not matter much.