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Congress Passes BOTS Act To Ban Ticket-Buying Software (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the level-the-playing-field dept.

Congress passed a bill yesterday that will make it illegal for people to use software bots to buy concert tickets. Ars Technica reports: The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act makes it illegal to bypass any computer security system designed to limit ticket sales to concerts, Broadway musicals, and other public events with a capacity of more than 200 persons. Violations will be treated as "unfair or deceptive acts" and can be prosecuted by the Federal Trade Commission or the states. The bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent last week, and the House of Representatives voted yesterday to pass it as well. It now proceeds to President Barack Obama for his signature. Computer programs that automatically buy tickets have been a frustration for the concert industry and fans for a few years now. The issue had wide exposure after a 2013 New York Times story on the issue. Earlier this year, the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman completed an investigation into bots. The New York AG's ticket sales report (PDF) found that the tens of thousands of tickets snatched up by bots were marked up by an average of 49 percent.

6 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. How is this different from arbitrage on the NYSE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    other than that it is done by broker bots instead of scalper bots?

  2. More regulations stifling businesses. by FictionPimp · · Score: 5, Funny

    Free market dictates that ticket companies that can't protect themselves from bots should go out of business and be replaced by ones that can. This is major government overreach. TRUMP!

    1. Re:More regulations stifling businesses. by ADRA · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ticket retailers are both a monopoly and an oligopoly. Essentially all retailer has a monopoly over a given venue. The venue may be allowed a small amount of ticket blocks which are used for their own purposes (direct sales, gifts, charity, marketing, etc..) but the vast direct-sales come through a single distributor.

      Those ticket distributors are largely an oligopoly, since venues only want to deal with reputable outlets with large market shares in order to maximize sales.

      All of them (Venue, Talent, Distributor) have a very shaky interest in eliminating scalping at all. Tickets are sold, the stadium is filled, most people are happy. Scalping only hurts one group of people: Consumers. In the long long term, people will be so jaded with going to 'ticketed' shows that the attendances will drop below capacity. That also hurts the smaller acts far more disproportionately than the rich ones (which have a more captivated audience to saturate the scalping tax). The arts dies and we all point fingers at one another instead of 'fixing the problem', whatever that looks like (I've given my 2 cents in a different post).

      --
      Bye!
  3. Re:How is this different from arbitrage on the NYS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good point. High Frequency Trading should be treated the same way. It won't be. But it should be.

  4. Change how tickets are sold by crow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If the tickets are being sold for $60, but people are willing to pay $150, then why aren't they offered first for $150? I see the big problem being the middlemen sucking money out without adding value. Let the entertainers get that money.

    If I were in charge of tickets for something like a pro sports team, the system I would use would be to put the tickets on sale at some ridiculous price, and announce that the price would drop 1% every four hours, or something like that. Then if you want the perfect seats and don't care that they're $1000, you can get your pick on the first day. Wait a few weeks, and they're $500. Wait until the day of the game, and anything left is $20. There's no need to set different prices on the better seats--they will sell earlier at a higher price.

    A system like that would make scalping at a profit nearly impossible.

  5. Re:How is this different from arbitrage on the NYS by Daemonik · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh would you shove it with the "liberals" nonsense. Conservatives game the government as much or more, you're just biased against noticing it.

    The truth is that humans will game any system we design.