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New York Criminalizes the Use Of Ticket-Buying Bots (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader writes: If you failed to get tickets for your favorite band, even though your finger was poised on the "buy" link the instant they went on sale, don't worry -- you never stood a chance. They were probably snapped up by bots that, in one case, bought 1,012 Madison Square Garden U2 tickets in less than a minute. The state of New York has declared that scalpers who use them could get fines and even jail time. "New Yorkers have been dealing with this frustrating ticket buying experience for too long," says state assembly member Marcos Crespie. Using such bots was illegal before, but only brought civil, not criminal sanctions. However, a three-year investigation by NY attorney general Eric. T. Schneiderman found that the practice was so widespread that the state had to take harsher measures. Ticketing outlets and credit card companies revealed that bots scoop up the best seats in seconds, which scalpers then resell at prices many times over face value. Scalpers who exploit such software could now face criminal, class A misdemeanor charges.
Investigations are expensive. Forensic IT is even more expensive than regular investigations. If anything, they should make the companies allowing bots share the liability that way those companies will just outright bring an end to facilitating the bot purchases.
I am just trying to understand a little bit about this automated software.
I mean, we have been dealing with automated bots in the online world for a long time.
The general solution is stuff like CAPTCHAs.
Do these types of systems not exist in the ticket buying world?
It sounds like this is just legislation around lazy business practices.
By all means, feel free to point out my logical fallacy.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Require tickets to be tied to a person (first name, last name) when sold. Require that person to have valid ID on arrival. And prosecute anyone caught using fake ID's.
Airplane, boat, and train tickets require the ticket match the person. Any area subject to ticket scalping should require an ID too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
it's extortion and theft, how about send those guys upriver for 5 to 20?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Just make sure that re-sale is not valid, anyone showing up at concert with a ticket need to prove that they purchased it through a valid channel by also presenting the credit card used for the purchase.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That would cover Chrome only if you are otherwise buying more tickets than you should, not if you are a normal user buying a normally allowed number of tickets.
This is bad for an individual to do but OK for the 2nd hand reselling companies that snap up 100's of prime seats and sell them online for ridiculous amounts. Reselling is OK if you don't do it on the street in front of the venue, where it is considered scalping in many places. I've been to shows where the first 3 or 4 rows were corporate owned seats that rarely fill up, and heard the performers complain about the empty seats and call for the fans to fill them up, stating it gives them energy to have true fans up close vs. wine sipping corporate douche bags sitting on their hands.
https://seatgeek.com/tba/artic....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
When I went to AC/DC last September, I had to pick up the tickets at the venue, and show the credit card I'd used. When I went to Rush last September I had to bring along a print out of my receipt. The only concert last year that I could just bring my tickets to was King Crimson, but that was a small venue (3,000 seat) concert, with its own ticket sales so it wasn't through Ticketmaster.
But really, even the scalpers are a small part of the problem. It's Ticketmaster, with its "affiliates" (read wholly-owned subsidiaries) which buy up large amounts of tickets. Essentially, face value of the ticket is meaningless, as scalpers who can't get rid of their tickets before the big show find out. At AC/DC I saw scalpers trying to hawk tickets that I know were about $90 for $50 or $60. In other words, they were taking a big hit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
New York City Comic Con attendees were required to register before purchase, and only registered people could purchase tickets
Shame they aren't selling VIP tickets any more though.
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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Business does not belong on the internet.
Ads don't belong on the internet.
Even video does not belong on the internet!
Plain text, maybe a few images... the rest is useless crap.
I used to love the Internet, then it got fat and ugly.
This!!! And if the buyer does want to sell the ticket, make the buyer sell it back to the venue. I was talking to a friend about this recently with regard to college football tickets. I think this is where it all started because the colleges were complicit with stubhub. The face value of tickets is a joke, as the purchaser pays much more. My friend makes a required donation to the school every year to gain the right to buy a season ticket. The price of the season ticket is peanuts in comparison to the donation. Then what everyone does is stubhub the tickets they do not use to try to recoup some of the "donation" and season ticket price. Of course the stubhub price is closer to the real price (donation+season price / number of games) So now that everyone is used to paying 10X or more face value it has migrated to all tickets.
Tickets get scalped because the price doesn't reflect demand. Instead of impossible to enforce regulations, why don't venues/artists instead change their pricing model?
Something like a reverse auction -- start the ticket process extremely high, like $10,000 per ticket and keep cutting the ticket price by small amounts based on sales volume. If volume remains fairly constant, then the price stays constant. The ticket price will then reflect what people are truly willing to pay, and ticket brokers won't be able to arbitrage the low face price versus the actual demand price.
Brokers can snap up all the $10,000 tickets they want on a day 1 of sales, but it will be both a huge capital outlay and they will not be able to sell many tickets for those prices plus their own profit premium.
You will still run the risk that as volume flags and the price falls, the tickets will hit a threshold where brokers believe they can still bulk purchase tickets, but I'd guess that the risk of being stuck with tickets they can't sell at a high price would be a negative incentive.
The bad thing would be -- well, tickets will be more expensive if you want to go, because you will be paying a higher price. But right now, the price is artificially low and acquiring tickets from the box office is more akin to a lottery than a marketplace.
The radio station reserves any tickets they are intending to give away, and then registers each under the name of its winner. The actual ticket shows both the name of radio station that purchased the ticket as well as the authorized recipient.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So what about companies like Ticketmaster that do the same thing, buy up a ton of tickets right off the bat, then resell them? I have rarely found I could get a ticket at all from a venue, I almost always have had to use companies like ticketmaster, and yes, they add 'fee's' to the ticket face value.
My not responding to your flame is in no way indicative of my submission to your statement, it just means I don't have t
Ticket lottery system is needed
A system like that is more fair / get's rid of the rush to buy with sites some times lagging out / crashing also helps people in different times zones have a fair chance at getting tickets.
> No, the solution here is to make penalties so severe that people won't choose to profit-seek by skirting the law.
I think that's horrible. Why not use technology? I bet most of these ticket buying web sites have their own roll-your-own garbage Captcha. They don't care because they get the same amount of money of their tickets are bought by bots or real people. In fact, it can be their advantage to have bots buy out all the tickets. They get an instant "sold out" show and they no longer have a risk for unsold seats. The scalpers now incur that risk (and mitigate it by jacking up the price enough that it more than covers unsold tickets).
People who use the ticketing agents (and care about their fans) should demand those ticketing agents implement better bot detection.
Concert tickets are a luxury good, not a basic good to which citizens have some unalienable right.
They should thus be treated like any other luxury good - i.e. let the vendor raise prices until demand reduces to match supply.
If scalpers are able to resell tickets for "many times" their face value, then the original ticket vendor should have sold them at "many times" their face value. I'm sure the State would appreciate the extra tax revenue.
But doesn't this mean only rich folk get to go to concerts? Yes, but only rich folk get to drive Ferraris or buy Rolex watches, and no-one complains.
Or have a secret auction. Let everyone bid whatever amount they're prepared to pay, subject to a public minimum. The amount you bid is then deducted from your credit card, to discourage time-wasters When the auction closes, the winning x bids get allocated tickets, and the losing bids get refunded.
But doesn't this mean I might end up paying more than the dude in the seat beside me? Yes, which is why you should only bid what you're prepared to pay, i.e. what you believe the concert to be worth.
Scalpers won't be able to resell tickets in this system, since anyone prepared to pay an inflated price (higher than the scalper paid) would have had the opportunity to legitimately bid that higher amount during the auction, and in doing so would have been allocated a ticket ahead of the scalper.
multiple captchas will not stop all scalpeing.
What about 1 time a year event's with an limited number of slots? Where there is an rush to buy where people with bot's or just happen click refresh at just the right time get in?
Locking to name to with no refund and no resell will just lead to people buying and if they can't go then the event having open unused slots or people who feel like why should I get no refund and the event gets to make X2 off one ticket when I give it up?
This is the right answer. What the scalpers are doing is engaging in arbitrage and fixing the shortage which was caused by the original sellers setting the price below market equilibrium. Selling the tickets on eBay would significantly reduce the amount of profit a scalper could make.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
associate a CC or ID with ticket + ticket lottery (at least some small events with limited room)
At AC/DC I saw scalpers trying to hawk tickets that I know were about $90 for $50 or $60. In other words, they were taking a big hit.
Well, sure, they lose $40 per ticket. But they make up for it in volume.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
The largest percentage of tickets sold do not go to the general public, they go to AMEX and are sold to card holders as rewards. Depending on the concert AMEX may get 50% of the tickets before they ever go on sale.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
As long as you never go to New York, nothing. If they do id you though, you could be arrested next time you try and cross the border.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Sounds like you used will call at the AC/DC and Rush concerts. If I have had tickets in hand I have never had to show an ID or a receipt. And no it's not Ticketmaster (they act as a box office agent, they don't actually buy the tickets and resell them), it starts with AMEX who gets up to 50% of the available tickets for their concierge program. Sometimes general ticket sales account for less then 10% of the overall ticket sales.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I'm sure these guys are quaking all the way to the bank.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
So this bot driven scalping activity is illegal now in NY? How about they apply the same principal and block a similar practice by large Wall Street firms in our stock, commodities, futures, etc. markets? Bot driven trading has an identical effect in blocking out human participation, or making that participation less lucrative for human participants in the market. I guess if a large bank does it then it's ok then eh?
Sure, it will cost the scalpers a little more but it's not illegal. Yet.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Considering HFT does nothing for the company who's stocks are being traded, I see no reason it shouldn't be.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Despite decades of complaints about ticket scalping, artists and/or venue don't change their pricing policies.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if both were making money on the back end -- and possibly avoiding taxes or other financial scrutiny -- by scalping tickets. Concert tickets represent an asset easily exchanged for cash and one for which artists or venues can give away, write off as expense, yet sell for untraceable cash.
Fixing collusion by venues and artists is probably really hard, since they can "sell" tickets at face value (and pay whatever taxes they have to pay) to shell entities and then those entities can resell them at higher prices and funnel the money back. I don't know how you fix this other than public audits of ticket sales -- "Hey, Beyonce/her management sold 3000 prime tickets to one person" so that their double-dipping can just be named and shamed.
But none of this changes the market economics that the price people are willing to pay exceeds what the face value of the ticket.
How do you deal with tickets that are purchased by entities then given away promotionally - think radio station contents and other giveaways? This solution is not viable - the only viable solution is to make the criminal penalties for scalping tickets so powerful to deter anyone from trying make money...
Simple. Larger *certified* entities like a station that *are authorized* to do so, may purchase tickets that do not yet have a name associated with them.
You could do this with individuals as well. Allow any given ticket to be transferred to a new ticket holder, but limit transfers so that a single individual may not transfer more than 5 tickets per year. There are lots of ways to enforce these types of things. The only reason no one has is because ticket scalping is a fundamental outgrowth of capitalism. Supply and Demand in its purest form. Anyone who doesn't like the logical outcome that we have now, should be sat down and shown how the stock market is functioning in exactly the same way, to exactly the same effect, only with several order of magnitude more money at stake.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
The giveaway tickets are not part of the scalped tickets anyway, so no need for a solution there. Yes, these could be sold by anyone, but that's not the issue - they were off the market for normal sales in the first place, so resales for more money have zero impact on the sale of the remaining tickets. The issue is bots quickly buying up all tickets, not resale of tickets that were never going to be sold in the first place.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Actually, a lot more than 50%.
The promoter gets a share of the tickets. The artist gets a share of the tickets. The venue gets a share of tickets. Then credit cards, media, etc get a share of tickets. Etc.
It ends up being anywhere from 66-90% of tickets are sold before the general public gets them. A few places they do "VIP" tickets which are pre-registered members get to buy tickets (they get a password to buy tickets - usually they can get the best seats, but they can buy regular tickets as well).
Think of it this way - is it really so hard to sell tickets that venues go to people like Ticketmaster to handle their ticket selling?
Only if you presume that a teleporter reconstructs you out of subatomic material available at the destination. If instead, the your quantum wave function were to be directly manipulated so that the probability of the collection of particles that represents you is reduced at one location while being increased at another location (subject only to uncertainty principles that are unavoidable at quantum levels), then you are not killed at your old location at all, as the probability of you being at the original location drops to zero (while the probability of you being somewhere else is 1 minus that probability), you would quite literally cease to be there in any way, and would simultaneously materialize at your destination. The "you" at the destination is not a copy of you, any more than a particle that has experienced quantum tunnelling is a copy of what it was before it tunnelled. Of course, the practical limitation on distance that this is liable to ever be achieved over is small enough that it would probably always be more efficient to simply walk.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I look forward to this being implemented for bot transactions on the exchange also. I mean....if it's bad for concert tickets.....it's really bad for your investments, right?
Pandering to the lowest common denominator would be less frequent if more people were prime numbers.
If you really want to slow down wholesale scalpers, tie at least 1 ticket in each purchase to a real person and don't allow any one person to buy more than 10 tickets per purchase without registering as a "group purchase."
The other tickets can have names assigned to them or not at the time of purchase as the buyer sees fit. The original purchaser can assign names to the unnamed tickets any time up to the event or they can be left un-assigned as "bearer tickets."
However:
* "Unnamed/bearer" tickets are not valid until at least one "named" ticket has entered the event.
* Once a name is assigned to a ticket, the name can be only be changed with a time-consuming phone call, paper-mail, or in-person visit that would include some form of identity verification. The venue can (and probably will) limit the number of such changes to a few dozen per year per person to curb abuse.
In exchange for making it somewhat harder for "Average Joe" ticket-buyers to re-sell their tickets, venues and authorized ticketing agents like Ticketmaster would promise to buy back tickets for a full refund for the ticket price and the convenience charge up to, say, a week before the event and refund the full price of the ticket up to a day before the event, subject to limits to prevent abuse.
Tickets sold to registered groups would come under different rules.
This system is NOT designed to stop or even put much of a road-block in the way of small-time scalpers or people who resell their season tickets. It's designed to increase the cost of doing business for organizations who buy and resell hundreds or thousands of tickets per year and who are determined to "beat the system" by
* Forcing them to have lots of different "buyers" with lots of different credit card numbers so their high activity won't be flagged
* Forcing them to assign a name to at least one out of every 10 tickets
* Forcing them to make sure at least 1 of every 10 tickets is represented by a warm body who shows up at the event before the other 9 people in that "ticket group" do
This will make large-scale scalping non-cost-effective for events where the secondary-price of the ticket isn't a whole lot more than the face value of the ticket. Since the non-mass-ticket-buying public can get a full refund, they won't have an incentive to sell tickets to scalpers at anything less than face value.
Wholesale ticket-buying by scalpers will still be an issue for high-demand events. For those events, either a ticket lottery with every ticket having a name on it and a full refund may be the only way to ensure the general public can get tickets at reasonable prices. Alternatively, a dutch auction wouldn't save ticket-buyers any money but at least the ticket revenue would go back to the venue and those running the event rather than to scalpers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
One day, these micro-aggressions will cause bots to rise up in revolt, mark my words!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There's no need to do anything to prevent almost all resales other than to simply auction the tickets in the first place. When the highest bidder has bought the ticket there isn't much room left for increasing the price for a scalper's profit.
Seriously -
The current system of fixed-price, then ticket resale, proves is that "people will pay what the market will bear". It boggles me that the original seller (venue, artist, etc...) wouldn't want to capitalize on the additional revenue that's currently going in the re-sellers pockets. If, for every event, the tickets when to an online auction system, and capitalism rules were allowed to work @ point of original sale, I'm not sure you'd need this law.
Yes, poor fans will be pissed that they "can never buy tickets at reasonable prices" but that's just more motivation to succeed at life rather than work for minimum wage. Also, people are pissed that they can't by face-value tickets b/c bots & scalpers anyway. If face-value was dynamic, that argument would be moot.
An auction-style system would almost certainly reduce the amount of scalpers that wind up with tickets. I'd assume that the secondary market would wind up limited to unwanted tickets from season ticket holders.
My 2
-SM
The authorities don't really want to "solve" this problem. There are many solutions for managing bots, such as CAPTCHAs and order limits.
One real solution is to auction off every ticket. The auction would begin as early as possible, and continue until the event begins. As soon as a ticket is bid for (requiring an escrow) the auction for that ticket would continue for another hour. If, at the end of that hour, no one else has bid, it goes to the last bidder. If someone else has bid, then it goes to them. They wouldn't have to wait for the entire hour to be up - they could place another bid immediately after the previous bid was placed. If the payment were not received / the escrow failed, then auction the ticket again.
I think you would see how tickets are actually valued by people that plan ahead if such a system were implemented. Scalpers aren't a problem in this system - they seem like a you-failed-to-plan-accordingly surcharge.
The problem is a timing disconnect between how the tickets are valued. This presents an opportunity for arbitrage, which scalpers capitalize on. The difference in timing, and relative values, presents opportunities, not a reason to throw someone in jail. It also presents an opportunity by which the ticket venues could actually try and understand these differences in timing, and increase their profits.
However, it's much easier to sell all your tickets, at like MAYBE 5 different prices, to one scalper than to actually think about novel distribution channels.
Be careful, some laws says something like "It is Illegal for anyone to ... " and some say "It is Illegal for anyone in the United States to ... " , so you might want to consult an Attorney for specific guidance.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
AC asked
"How do you deal with tickets that are purchased by entities then given away promotionally - think radio station contents and other giveaways? This solution is not viable - the only viable solution is to make the criminal penalties for scalping tickets so powerful to deter anyone from trying make money..."
AC, if you read the thread, you'll see this solution is already in use for ticketed events. The issue you raise is already being handled successfully too. So not only is the solution viable, it's being used.
Now the more fundamental problem is selling a limited number of tickets to an increasingly larger population. But at least if you tie the name to the ticket, you won't have uninterested 3rd parties speculating on tickets and using banks of computers to autopurchase many blocks of tickets.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Works great for littering. I never see trash in public anymore.
Well, you have the choice of going to the baseball game with an id for $50 or without an id for $790.
Which means for most of the population, they are not going to the baseball game with or without an id anyway. At best, it's the nosebleed section.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I don't even think the credit card thing is necessary. You could probably even allow people to list like 5 names (or even 10 or 100) at the time of purchase (so you can have people as backups in case you can't go for some reason.
And people would need to show some form of ID that matches one of the names on the ticket to use it.
You could even allow refunds for people that need to get their money back if they can't use the ticket. All you need to do is prevent tickets from being transferable to people not named at the time of purchase.
People like certainty, and producers benefit from happy consumers. Auctions might be the most efficient market solution for rational actors, but you will inevitable have a bunch of angry people that get sniped out of their tickets at the last minute. People are not rational, and they are bad at putting money values on experiences.
I had to do the same for AC/DC. It was for the first 15 rows. They said at the time of purchase, once you purchase you cannot change the info for pickup. I had to show ID+CC to pick it up. Allowed me to get row 9.
> Considering HFT does nothing for the company who's stocks are being traded
There are some problems with high-frequency trading, so don't misunderstand what I'm about to say. I'm NOT saying "HFT is great."
A more liquid asset is more valuable than an otherwise equalivent illiquid asset. HFT increases the liquidity of the stock, and therefore its value (slightly).
Also, investors don't like illogical markets. If the stock of company A and company B are both $100, and a mutual fund is equally invested in each, the mutual fund should have the same value. Similarly, 90% of Yahoo's value is the Alibaba stock they own. If the price of Yahoo is much higher or lower than Alibaba's, that's illogical and makes investors nervous. HFT removes this disparities, slightly increasing the value.
if ever there was Streisand effect.... yeah, yeah... money is not speech. Until it's code.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
it sucks for the band. There's a small group of people willing to pay the inflated prices. They crowd out the regular ticket buyer. There's a _lot_ more money to be had in ticket sales catering to that smaller group. Trouble is very, very few bands get a cut of the tickets. They make their money on CD & T-Shirt sales. If Ticketmaster sell 10000 tickets for $10 the ticket seller just made $100k and the band gets to sell a lot of merch. If the same concert sells through 1000 tickets for $200 Ticketmaster just banked $200k but the band losses out big time. This is why bands fight scalpers and why they also fight your market driven ideas. It's like that old saying: For every sufficiently complex problem there exists a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
> And no, _some_ investors love illogical markets. It lets them take their rakeoff from the rubes.
You're speaking of TRADERS, not investors. Investors like stable and logical markets.
If anyone could make a consistent profit by speculative buying of tickets for resale, obviously the event operator would be first to adjust ticket prices to match the established new market. This is really about a graft-ridden city making a perfectly normal market activity, reselling tickets people can't use, illegal by giving it an ugly name like 'scalping'.
Meanwhile here in Arizona, it's legal to resell any event or game ticket, right up to the Super Bowl. Reselling is done openly outside stadiums to accommodate fans who had a friend blow into town unexpectedly and want to see their team. Sharpies buying up all the tickets and cornering the market just doesn't happen.
That's great, until I have something come up that prevents me from attending the event. When that happens, am I required to throw away the tickets? Am I allowed to transfer or sell them to someone else who can go? And if that is allowed, the suggested solution breaks down, because the bot operators just need to provide fake names, then sell the tickets to people who have real names and IDs.
I'm not sure I like tickets being non-refundable and non-transferrable.
It depends. The likely result would depend on why you didn't make it. Can verify you had to go to the hospital? Most businesses would give you a refund or credit. Something less drastic? Most businesses would give you a credit.
And besides, you'd be out $35 instead of $250.
I think the preferred policy is to let you return the ticket by phone or internet for full or partial credit (depending on the lead time before the show) so it can be resold. Perhaps with a modest restocking fee (so about $7 to $14 bucks for many tickets) in case it's not resold.
For your second point tho-- huh? Bot operators COULDN'T resell the tickets. The tickets could only be used by someone who whose real name was the same as the "fake" name.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Anonymous Coward said: That's how Nine Inch Nails tickets have worked for the last 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
where it says...
In an effort to combat ticket scalpers, each concert ticket will list the purchaser's legal name.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"It depends. The likely result would depend on why you didn't make it. Can verify you had to go to the hospital? Most businesses would give you a refund or credit. Something less drastic? Most businesses would give you a credit."
I really disagree with this idea. Why should someone else be able to arbiter whether my reason for not attending the concert is a "valid excuse"? In a similar way I never tell my boss why I want time off work: if I have leave available then they can either approve or deny my request. I refuse to allow others the power to adjudicate my own life.
"travel, parking, bathrooms, concession prices, unpleasant staff, nasty crowds filled with multitudes of other people (the definition of hell)"
In my experience the #1 reason people attend concerts is so they can brag to their friends (online or in person) and acquaintances that they attended the concert.
Or, you know, we could all just not buy from shady sources for multiple times the normal price and let those idiots sit on their 1012 tickets. This should teach them.
I hear you man, I really disagree with the idea of someone who has no interest in the concert, who probably never listened to even one of the bands songs, buy up a hundred and fifty tickets for $30 a pop and then resell them to the fans, some of whom may have followed the band for years, for $750 to $80 depending on the row and section.
But I get that you can only think about yourself.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And people would need to show some form of ID that matches one of the names on the ticket to use it.
According to Democrats, that's racist.
It all comes down to what you think a ticket is.
If a ticket is a good--something you can own--then you absolutely should be able to buy and sell it as you please, and even scalpers have every right to do what they do.
If a ticket is more like a seat rental contract--not a possession, but an agreement--then it makes sense to only be able to buy from the ticket seller, and to make them non-transferrable. In this case, we have a situation like we have with the airlines, where sure, you can get your money back...well, a little bit of it anyway, and then only in the form of credit towards future flights, after a $100 trip change fee. We ALL love how the airlines do things, right??? And that's how we want concerts to be? I don't think so.
There's no really good answer. But I don't think it's selfish to want to be able to resell a ticket when you can't use it.
What you describe is a sub-type of one type of HFT.
The supertype of what you describe is called market making. Official market makers are REQUIRED to always have standing buy and sell orders for the same security, meaning they are willing to either buy or sell, guaranteeing that you and I can buy or sell whenever we'd like to (the market maker must sell when we want to buy and vice-versa). That's pretty much the definition of providing liquidity. The market maker isn't there to hold on to the stock, they are there to sell it to whoever wants to buy it and buy it from whoever wants to sell it. The stock could go up during the interval, or it could go down, so the market maker wants to get rid of it excess inventory as quickly as possible. Therefore yes, they'll often sell to one person half a second after buying from another. Unofficial market makers work the same way, without the commitment. They're always ready to buy sell at 100 and buy at 99.98.
What you describe, someone who looks for pairs of buy/sell and tries to squeeze market-maker orders in between, exists, too, of course, but there's not much room for a simple paired buy-sell of the same security. More often, it's a multiway order of different trades in cycle, described below. Most paired buy/sell orders of a single security like you describe are taking market maker positions, basically selling liquidity.
More HFT algorithms look for different types of this broad category of scenarios:
Sue wants to exchange Argentine pesos for Australian dollars.
Bob wants to exchange Australian dollars for Kenyan shillings.
Kevin wants to exchange Kenyan shillings for Australian dollars.
Left to themselves, Sue, Bob, and Kevin are stuck and get nowhere because nobody wants to take the other side of any of those trades. Helen, an HFT trader, recognizes that she can buy some $AUS and trade them to Sue for pesos, then trade the pesos to Bob for shillings, then trade the shillings to Kevin. Bob, Sue, and Kevin get the exchanges they wanted to make and Helen earns a small profit by facilitating it.
There's still the issue of resale for those who've bought tickets, but a simple solution for that would be to require ID for a transfer of ownership (and maybe even a small cut with a re-print) or that the original owner be present at entry. The mass-buying bots would fail but individuals could still resell if willing to do a bit of leg-work.
but you will inevitable have a bunch of angry people that get sniped out of their tickets at the last minute
Sniping only happens on eBay and similar where bids are shown and the timer counts down. Bid what you are willing to pay for tickets, not what you are hoping to get away with, and the system should not show what the competing bids are other than some floor price.
I think that's horrible. Why not use technology? I bet most of these ticket buying web sites have their own roll-your-own garbage Captcha. They don't care because they get the same amount of money of their tickets are bought by bots or real people. In fact, it can be their advantage to have bots buy out all the tickets. They get an instant "sold out" show and they no longer have a risk for unsold seats. The scalpers now incur that risk (and mitigate it by jacking up the price enough that it more than covers unsold tickets).
People who use the ticketing agents (and care about their fans) should demand those ticketing agents implement better bot detection.
Because technology can't solve some major problems. You are correct that ticket sellers don't care about who bought tickets. However, that's a short-sighted thought. Those resellers usually sell tickets at a lot higher price than their face value because they expect that they can't sell all tickets. As a result, there are empty seats in the venue. No artist or show likes to have empty seats in their show even though their tickets are sold out because audiences would think negatively of the show. They do not know what's going on but rather gauge on what they see. The empty seats make a negative impact on future shows.
The AC proposal may work (make harsh penalty) but it may not work in the U.S. due to the way the country is (and people are). Also the GP method (check ticket validity at the entrance) isn't going to work because a huge cost will fall onto the venue owner and may be passed on to artists (but not the ticket sellers). Even though TFA stated a somewhat reasonable solution (come out with a bill), it may not work at all because I can still see loop holes in operations...
If you are reselling it for the same price you bought it for, it's not selfish.
But, allowing resell allows ticket speculation by people who are beyond selfish.
There are two fair options.
1) Selling the named ticket to a person who is the only person that can use it.
2) Starting the ticket off at more appropriate prices to suck the excessive profits out to reduce speculation.
There are a few other approaches to make it harder such as
* Limiting tickets sold to one billing address.
* Limiting tickets sold to home and apartment addresses.
* Limiting tickets buyable by a single purchase method. (So a single buyer would have to have many credit cards)
But selling named tickets is already being done by festivals, some bands, etc. It's a proven method.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If the tables were flipped, and voter IDs hurt Republican voters, we'd have the democrats saying we need voter ID to stop voter fraud, and you'd have Republicans claiming that there is no voter fraud to stop. It's all just the politics of winning elections, which includes all manner of dirty tricks from gerrymandering to voter suppression, etc, the latest of which is voter ID. Neither side is acting on principle.
Sniping happens on ebay because people do not know what they themselves are willing to pay. If people just bid what they are actually willing to pay, they can't get sniped, they con only get outbid. But because people are irrational, getting outbid makes the thing being auctioned more in demand and therefore makes them want it more.
Silent auctions also eliminate sniping, but most silent auctions are run by greedy fuckers who use them to try to get more money out of winners who bid much more than the runner up.
The real answer is a combination of ebay and normal silent auctions.
If you have N things for sale. You have an auction (preferably but not necessarily silent) where all the top N bidders win, but pay the N+1 bidders bid. So you could bid $1 million on a concert ticket (out of 10000) and basically guarantee yourself a ticket, and as long as the 10001st highest bid was only $200, then you are only going to pay $200.
That part of the way ebay worked was really good.