https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65OMoWgfgNA

Fraud is already a crime. Prison, fines, and forfeiture are appropriate penalties for people who engage in fraud. You might institute a licensing requirement to assist the state in tracking people who sell tickets on the secondary market. There are trade-offs incorporated in doing that, however. (I believe the General Business Law in New York does require licensing of ticket vendors, with the register of franchises maintained by the Secretary of State. We could check). However, in efforts to combat fraud, there’s no need to regulate prices.

Just sayin’.

Yes, you can take them to a mechanic. But when you’re poor, that could mean if you look at five cars shelling out for inspections that cost more than the car.

The best bet, and I’ve been there a few times, is to buy off a friend. That is so they have some stake in their assurances.

“A person who bought a ticket and wants to resell that ticket isn’t the target of the laws”

The scalper bought the tickets — they’re their property. You’re asking for a restriction between producer and buyer. We call that retailing, where I come from.

Most sales are scalping, it’s just that we’re so used to it we don’t notice. When we buy from a shop we don’t pay cost plus distribution charges, we pay what the retailer thinks they can get away with.

If the actual manufacturer sold iPhones direct, they’d cost way less. When the price of avocados sky rockets due to decreased supply, I don’t get on my high horse — even though the retailer likely bought them at a fixed price agreed before the season started. The retailer takes the loss when there’s oversupply and I can buy three for a dollar (which is when I do buy them).

It’s free markets in action. They don’t have scalping in non-free markets, but they have other more serious issues.

Complaints about the poor being priced out are the bread and butter of requests for Socialism. That’s what drives the people who want to make the system “fair”.

Scalping complaints are so middle class. People that don’t like it when they feel the pinch of free markets, not just the poor.

No, it’s not nonsense. A lot of fraud exists, but there are laws to try to limit it.

And a car is a car, even a used car. An object. You can drive it before you buy it. You can take it to a mechanic.

Tickets are sold online. There’s apparently a lot of fraud. Why shouldn’t that be regulated?

I don’t think these laws are aimed at restricting an owner from selling his property. A person who bought a ticket and wants to resell that ticket isn’t the target of the laws. The target is automated systems run by businesses that buy up a huge proportion of the tickets for popular venues merely to resell them, despite the sellers’ wishes to limit them to bona fide human beings.

I think “Hamilton” was the first production to figure out that they could get most of the mark-up by jacking up the face value of the ticket. That started a trend and now most performances start with a ticket price close to what folks are willing to pay on the second hand market, or any market.

And Neo, I know you addressed the reasons for illegality in the above comment, but most of that is nonsense. You could say the same for most any product. How can we trust the second hand car market. There are lies and counterfeits galore. To me, it boils down to a basic, human right. If I own property I should be free to sell it.

I certainly wasn’t suggesting that theater tickets are some sort of necessity.

But lots of things are regulated that aren’t a matter of life or death or health, and there used to be laws against scalping (and still are, to a certain extent). Why? Here’s why:

One common concern with resale is with scam artists selling fake tickets to unsuspecting buyers. Another common practice is scalpers that sell tickets that have already been scanned at the venue gate since entry is typically allowed only when a ticket is scanned for the first time. Since the tickets were authentic, buyers do not have a way of telling if a ticket had been used or not.

A concern when buying tickets on the street from a ticket scalper or via an online auction is that the tickets sold by ticket re-sellers may themselves be stolen or counterfeit. For many major sporting events, counterfeit tickets are auctioned off in the months leading up to the event. These criminals and their activities are not to be confused with legitimate ticket brokers and individuals who abide by the law to legally resell tickets on the secondary market…

In recent years, fraudsters have started to use more complex methods by which they obtain tickets for resale on the secondary market. Similar to the technology used to snatch up rare shoes and sneakers, automated bot attacks have become a common way to acquire large numbers of tickets only to resell them for higher profits. What fraudsters will do is deploy thousands of bots from untraceable IP addresses in a brute force attack as soon as a venue or ticket seller first makes them available for sale. In 2017, one of the largest online ticket sellers Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit against Prestige Entertainment for their continued use of scalper bots despite paying $3.35 million to the New York Attorney General’s Office just a year prior. Ticketmaster claimed that Prestige Entertainment was able to lock up 40% of available tickets for performances of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, as well as a majority of the tickets Ticketmaster had available for the Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao fight in Las Vegas in 2015. In an effort to curtail such behavior, Congress moved to pass the Better Online Tickets Sales Act of 2016, more commonly referred to as the BOTS act. The legislation was signed into law in December 2016 by then President Barack Obama. The BOTS act enforces several penalties and fines for parties found guilty of using bots or other technology for undermining online ticket seller systems with the hopes of selling them on the secondary ticket market…

In 2008, Internet ticket fraud had emerged as global problem, when fake ticket websites defrauded millions of dollars from sports fans by selling Beijing Olympics tickets which they had no intention of delivering.

According to Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch, many online ticket resellers use URLs that are similar to official box-office websites, sometimes implying via their texts or their pictures that they are official, use internet advertising to increase traffic to their website, and don’t clearly state the real prices they charge for a ticket.

In that case, the service provider is trying to capture more consumer surplus by price discrimination. The people arriving at the end are business travelers whose ticket is purchased by the corporation or they are personal travelers under the most severe time constraints. That behavior by vendors makes ready sense. Ticketron’s behavior is undertaken for more esoteric reasons.

If the ticket vendor sold them at the market-clearing price, buyers would also be priced out of the market. The curio here is that they’re not sold at the market-clearing price by the vendor.

There’s no end to the ways nice things are better than not-as-nice things. Theatre tickets are not a matter of social concern. Medical care, long-term care, schooling, and legal services are.