By Jody Godoy
Jan 7 (Reuters) – Ticketmaster is urging a federal judge in Los Angeles to throw out the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s case accusing it of working with resellers to gouge fans, saying the law it is accused of violating applies only to resellers, not ticketing platforms.
Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation urged U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong to dismiss the case.
The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act “is designed to help ticket issuers like Ticketmaster” combat abusive resale practices and does not apply to Ticketmaster itself, the company said in court papers filed late on Tuesday.
The FTC and seven states sued the companies in September, alleging that Ticketmaster ignored brokers’ violations of ticket purchasing limits set by artists so that it could reap $3.7 billion in resale fees between 2019 and 2024. Ticketmaster has known since 2018 that resellers illegally violate its ticket limit policies, the FTC and states said.
The BOTS Act passed in 2016 bans circumventing technological measures that Ticketmaster and other platforms use to prevent resellers from mass-purchasing tickets for resale. And it prohibits the sale of tickets obtained by those methods.
Ticketmaster cannot be held liable under the law because resellers, not Ticketmaster, are the ones who sell the tickets listed on its resale platform, the company argued. And the FTC and states have not shown Ticketmaster’s purchase limits are measures covered by the law.
Ticketmaster dominates live event ticketing in the U.S., controlling up to 80% of concert ticketing for major event venues, according to an FTC estimate.
The company faced intense criticism after its botched 2022 sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s much-hyped Eras Tour, when billions of requests from Swift fans, bots and ticket resellers overwhelmed its website and the company canceled a planned ticket sale to the general public.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster are scheduled to face trial in March in a separate case brought by the Department of Justice accusing them of monopolizing markets across the live concert industry. The companies have denied the allegations.
(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New YorkEditing by Bill Berkrot)
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