By Sofia Mason. Regardless if it’s a team or solo competition, sports are one of the most entertaining forces in this world, where the ultimate goal is to bring people together. Recently, instead of bringing people together, something has been driving fans away. What is this, you may ask? Ticket inflation.
Ticket inflation has been a trend across all sports and only gets worse year by year. Resale ticket prices have been absurdly overpriced, especially for championship finals. These inflated prices were seen all year in big finals like the US Open, World Series and WNBA finals. Being a sports fan is becoming more and more unaffordable every day. The thing is, it’s not the organizations themselves selling bad seats for thousands of dollars but rather the secondary ticket market.
The secondary ticket market is basically the eBay of ticket sales. Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, and StubHub, are some secondary ticket markets to name a few. If you can’t buy tickets directly from the source, do not fret, just go to them for a second chance, the thinking goes. But when your secondary market options are filled with scalpers, also known as “resellers,” it makes going to your sporting event even more difficult than before.
This problem has been discussed for a while so that a law has even been passed against using bots to scalp tickets nationwide. The act is the Better Online Ticket Sales Act of 2016, better known as the “BOTS act.” Congress.gov states that this bill with the catchy name “prohibits the circumvention of a security measure, access control system, or other technological measure on an Internet website or online service of a ticket issuer that is used to enforce posted event ticket purchasing limits or to maintain the integrity of posted online ticket purchasing order rules for a public event with an attendance capacity exceeding 200 persons.” Using bots and similar software to detect violations is allowed if necessary. “It shall not be unlawful, however, to create or use software or systems to: (1) investigate, or further the enforcement or defense of, alleged violations; or (2) identify and analyze flaws and vulnerabilities of security measures to advance the state of knowledge in the field of computer system security or to assist in the development of computer security products.”
With this act bots should pretty much be gone. Yet more can still be done.
New York is one of the seven states that requires you to have to have a license to resell tickets. (The others are New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Alabama, Georgia, and Illinois.) The law is very specific – it notes tickets can’t be resold within 1,500 feet of a large venue (5,000 or more people), or 500 feet of a smaller venue, for instance – however there are significant exceptions to the license requirement.
“Websites that resell tickets need licenses,” begins the site “Ticket Reseller License” of NYC MyCity, the official website of the City of New York. “However, auction websites do not need licenses. Non-profit organizations do not need a license. A license is not needed for selling tickets originally bought for personal use.”
These licenses have a $5,000 nonrefundable application fee and are annually renewed every year. As said in the law, if you bought the ticket for personal use it is ok to resell it. If you buy a large amount of tickets just to resell them all for an overpriced amount you’ll be needing a license. But this law seems easy to circmumvent, since how do you prove if an individual bought tickets “personal use”?
So why are tickets still so expensive? Too much demand, too little supply, and a lot of greed. Regardless of the laws and acts people still find ways to get around the newfound reselling protections. Soon one day the problem will be truly fixed but for now it is still a work in progress. There are bigger things to concern yourself over nowadays so appreciate whenever you find that decently priced ticket, especially for big games. When sitting there you might even remember that article about reselling protections, but that’s boring so put it to the back of your mind and enjoy the game.
