Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Says some one who has never bought tickets months in advance. Sometimes life happens.
Granted this law will do nothing with the biggest offender. Credit card pre-sales. You know, those credit card rewards that guarantee you tickets before anyone else can get them. Or the fact bands themselves may scalp their own tickets.
Your likely hood of getting tickets from the box office are basically nil for a popular show.
Take the Jan 18 Bieber show. Out of 14000 seats, just over 1000 were available for general sale.
6000 went to Amex presales
3000 to Fan Club members
2600 to promotions, guest lists and un-sell-able seats (due to visual obstruction)
900 to other VIP programs
and 500 were scalped by the biebs himself
1001 were sold to the general public.
So yeah, lets blame the scalpers.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
In that particular case, I would call that a public service.
Otherwise, scalpers should be scalped.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
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?