Ticketmaster To Web Brokers: How Dare You Infringe On Our Ability To Exploit Our Own Customers
Oh, that spunky Hannah Montana and all the mischief she’s brought to usually staid world of buying concert tickets! A few years ago, you’d get gouged by the faceless operators/implacable Web interface at Ticketmaster, and like it. Maybe some gnarled-looking guy in a NASCAR jacket in the parking lot of the venue as you desperately scrounged around on the night of the event. But that was it! But now you have the opportunity to get ripped off by thousands of faceless Internet assholes, whose hyper-speed software allows them to overprice tickets only minutes after they go on sale. And, well, you had to know it was only a matter of before the big dog started throwing its weight around, sparked by the hundreds of anguished reports of weeping adults and children distraught over broker-fueled Montana sell-outs across the country, with Ticketmaster bringing its Eddie-Vedder-crushing legal staff to bear:
IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ticketmaster earlier this year filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against RMG Technologies Inc., a small Pittsburgh-based company that runs TicketBrokerTools.com. According to papers filed with the lawsuit, RMG rents to scalpers software that can inundate Ticketmaster’s computers with thousands of requests for seats, “in effect allowing them to cut in line,” according to Joe Freeman, a Ticketmaster vice president.
Last month, Ticketmaster filed a motion for a preliminary injunction that would prohibit RMG from selling such software; Judge Audrey B. Collins is expected to rule on the motion this month.
In a court filing of his own, RMG’s lawyer, Jay M. Coggan, dismissed Ticketmaster’s allegations. “This may be the only time in the history of litigation that any seller sued its customers for paying them too much money,” he wrote.
Strangely enough, RMG and its own legal team refused to speak with the Wall Street Journal. Well, their lawyer likened RMG’s technological bypassing of Ticketmaster’s yes-I-am-a-real-human verification system by likening it to “where one person would go sit in line and hold places for 10 people.” Which isn’t illegal, but does make you an extreme asshole if you get to the window and buy all the fucking tickets. ‘Course, don’t go praising Ticketmaster’s social crusade just yet. As the WSJ also notes:
“Ticketmaster is a beneficiary of the spiraling costs in the aftermarket, thanks to its own secondary marketplace, TicketExchange, where seats for the tour’s Nov. 29 stop at Memphis’s FedEx Forum range from $243 to $363. The service’s Web site says it allows fans to buy tickets “without having to bid against other buyers, without having to coordinate delivery from anonymous sellers, and without the gamble that the tickets are legitimate.”
Ticketmaster suing brokers out of something other than a sense of enlightened altruism for the kiddies and parents locked out of seeing their beloved Hannah? Say it ain’t so!
Hannah Montana Battles The Bots [Wall Street Journal]
