The New England Patriots last week received the names of 13,000 people who bought or sold Pats tickets through StubHub. Season ticket holders are rightly concerned that the Pats may now revoke the subscriptions of those who circumvented the Pats’ own Ticketmaster-run system.
A Massachusetts judge ordered StubHub to release the names last year, a ruling that was affirmed last week by the state Appeals Court.
Diane, a season ticket holder who asked not to be identified for fear of being targeted by the Patriots, said she sold some of her seats on StubHub to help defray the cost of purchasing them.“It’s my ticket, and I should be able to do whatever I want with it,” she said.
The Patriots view their tickets as revocable licenses that they control. The team currently prohibits resales anywhere but on the team’s website, which is run by Ticketmaster and requires fans to sell their tickets at face value.
Mike, another season ticket holder who attempted to sell tickets on StubHub and requested anonymity, said he didn’t appreciate the Patriots going to court to obtain private information about him.
But other sports fans applauded the Patriots for trying to prevent season ticket holders from making enormous profits on their tickets.
“Whatever happened to buying tickets for the games you want to go to, rather than buying them so that you can resell them and essentially price the average blue collar fan out of going to a game,” said Sean Duke-Crocker of Brookline.
Do you agree with the team or the ticket holders? Tell us in the comments.
Patriots season ticket holders fear being put on hot seat [Boston Globe]
(Photo: Paul Keleher)
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I agree with the team, and I found the pro-scalper/free market argument of Hylander to be hollow, because the laws of economics govern commodities, not contracts that state that they are transferrable under only certain conditions. The movable object that is the ticket is not the agreement that legally permits you in the door. It is simply a written statement that serves as verification of that contract. Unless you sell your ticket under the terms of the contract you have with the Patriots, then legally the contract was violated, and the Patriots are no longer bound to live up to their end of the agreement to let the (scalped) ticket holder in. Once the contract between the original purchaser violated the terms of the agreement which outlined his right to attend the game, the agreement was broken, and the contract not enforceable. This is more about contract law than economics. To some degree, this is also about criminal law as well, since the state law that specifically prohibits scalping by limiting the increase in price upon any “reselling tickets,” is being violated. This law is a consumer-protection oriented law. There is such a thing as the rights of the local fans, even if it is not written into the constitution. You would think Patriots fans would be amongst the most likely to be sure that they 1) knew who was using their STH seats 2) not try to profit off of the transfer of an agreement to attend an event on the Kraft property, and 3) treat the tickets with more respect, in the belief that it’s more supposed to be about the GAME itself.
@erik65:
It’s Hyland, thanks.
Also, It’s not a Pro-scalper/free market argument. It’s an explanation of what is going on using economics. It turns into an argument because it forces conclusions to be drawn that at at odds with most of the knee jerk responses to ticket resale.
You called my comment hollow, and then processed to ignore them. Please go back and read them.
The free market governs any interaction where someone is buying and selling something. ust because the patriots put a contract on their ticket and order to buyer to not resell it doesn’t mean that people no longer make economic decisions. They made a decision to buy the ticket (enter into the contract, if you prefer) in the first place.
I also understand and acknowledge that this is about contract law, contract theory as well as economics. What you don’t understand is that those contracts OBVIOUSLY aren’t preventing ticket resale. I don’t care how you couch the agreement, resale will occur if there is an opportunity and incentive for arbitrage generated by the ticket price. Period.
I’m not arguing who is right or wrong here. I’ve already said, I don’t really care who is right or wrong. Personally, I feel that if we start feeling that tickets are “the priveledge to attend an event of the Kraft property” alone, that is pretty sad. But how I feel about that isn’t important.
Go and read ANY of my posts trying to explain this. I had hoped I had made myself pretty clear, maybe I failed to.
The contracts OBVIOUSLY limit the resale conditions.
And thanks for acknowledging that they are just a contract, not a commodity, which makes all economic arguments irrelevant.