With public attention focused on the scourge of online ticket scalping, Congress has passed a bill outlawing bots, or computer programs that let users scoop up the best tickets and resell them at inflated prices.
But will this law be enough to tame an $8 billion secondary ticket market that is increasingly global?
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, or BOTS Act, with bipartisan support, following the bill’s passage a week ago in the Senate. It will now go to the White House for President Obama’s signature.
The bill accomplishes what advocates like Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” have long pushed for. It would make it illegal to circumvent the security measures of ticketing websites, which bots often do, and would give enforcement authority to the Federal Trade Commission. Critics say bots feed a high-priced resale market that pushes tickets out of reach of ordinary consumers, particularly for hot events like “Hamilton.”
Ticketmaster has estimated that bots have been used to buy 60 percent of the most desirable tickets to many shows.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, who was a sponsor of the bill and campaigned for its passage with Mr. Miranda and others, cheered the action by the House.
“With this soon-to-be-new law that will eliminate ‘bots’ and slap hackers with a hefty fine, we can now ensure those who want to attend shows in the future will not have to pay outrageous, unfair prices,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement.
Yet in the trenches of the music industry, there is doubt about how much impact the act will have. The world of bots is shadowy and little understood, with much of the software being developed and even operated overseas, complicating enforcement. And there is an enormous incentive for scalping, which is legal and now largely integrated into the mainstream concert business through sites like StubHub and even Ticketmaster.
“There is only one way to stop the scalping industry, and that’s to make it illegal,” said Seth Hurwitz, an independent concert promoter and the owner of the 9:30 Club in Washington. “Anything else is just Whac-a-Mole, and grandstanding by politicians.”
The passage of the BOTS Act is the result of years of frustration among members of the public as well as artists and producers irritated by an industry that profits from their work. In an interview, Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton,” called scalping “a usurious, parasitic business that only serves to create a new profit center between the artist and the consumer.”
This year, an investigation by the New York State attorney general found abuses like a single scalper buying more than 1,000 tickets in under a minute for a U2 concert at Madison Square Garden. Ticket bots are illegal in New York, and last month Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a law increasing penalties for their use.
In Britain and Europe, there has been significant political momentum to reform ticketing laws. The British government commissioned a major report on the scalping industry there, and lawmakers in Italy are considering proposals to curtail ticket reselling after reports that the head of the Italian branch of Live Nation, the global concert company, was funneling tickets directly to the secondary market.
In the United States, that progress has been much slower. While few spoke against the BOTS Act — the National Association of Ticket Brokers, which bars bots among its members, welcomed the bill — ticket scalping has become a standard part of the entertainment economy, and services like StubHub are often welcomed by fans for their convenience. Economists frequently endorse secondary markets as a true demonstration of supply and demand.
Supporters of the BOTS Act believe it could aid law enforcement in ways that were unavailable before. In 2010, federal prosecutors charged a group of men operating as Wiseguy Tickets with fraud for evading online ticketing safeguards in acquiring more than a million tickets that were resold for $25 million in profit. But the case hinged on whether the men had violated federal laws or merely run afoul of TicketMaster’s terms of service, and the Wiseguy operators received only probation.
The BOTS Act would make it illegal to bypass an online security system like TicketMaster’s.
“Laws don’t stop every crime, but the fact that there are new civil penalties for circumventing the technology that tries to keep tickets in the hands of fans will create a disincentive,” said Daryl P. Friedman, the chief advocacy and industry relations officer of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Grammy Awards, which lobbied for the bill.
Yet even the BOTS Act’s biggest supporters acknowledge that as much as they welcome the proposed law, it alone will not end the problems of online ticket scalping.
“Is this the exact bill I would write? No. Is it imperfect? Of course,” said Mr. Seller, the “Hamilton” producer. “Is it better than nothing? You bet.”
By Ben Sisario
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/business/media/ticket-scalping-bots-act.html?_r=1
[Thank you to Alex Teitz, http://www.femmusic.com, for contributing this article.]* * * * *
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