More Big Brother in New England

The AP reports, “New England Patriots have won a bid to get the names of all the fans who bought or sold - or tried to buy or sell - tickets to home games through online ticket reseller StubHub Inc. In a lawsuit against San Francisco-based StubHub, a subsidiary of eBay Inc., claiming that the Web site encourages fans to break state law and violate team policies, the Patriots said they could seek to revoke season tickets of people who use StubHub. Daniel Goldberg, a lawyer for the Patriots, would not say what the team plans to do with the 13,000 names, which StubHub gave it last week after losing its appeal of a Massachusetts state court ruling. Team rules bar reselling game tickets for a profit. State law, though rarely enforced, restricts ticket markups to $2 above face value plus some service charges. Patriots tickets have been offered on StubHub at prices many times higher. StubHub argued that the Patriots' request violated its confidentiality agreement with its customers.”

 

What’s not clear from this report is if StubHub provided just the names of buyers and sellers and/or if it also included data on the prices for which the tickets were bought or sold. And why do the Patriots want the names of ticket buyers? What has that go to do with the scalping of tickets for which the Pats are supposedly trying to curtail?

 

Prospective ticket sellers in Massachusetts should borrow a practice from the NFL teams themselves. When you sell tickets to games online, make it clear that you are not selling the actual tickets, but a license for the opportunity to buy the tickets. The license has no face value, thus can’t violate the state law (plus, the license is such a novel concept it may not even be addressed in the state law). You can sell the license at a mark up and the tickets at face value.

 

More generally, what is up with the Patriots? It’s like George W. Bush is running the team. First, the coach was caught illegally surveiling his opponents, covered it up and glossed over it. (with a nice assist from Roger Goodell, the NFL’s version of the enabling AG Fredo Gonzalez, a man supposedly in charge of enforcing the rules but who in reality does whatever his master wants him to  -which in Goodell’s case meant destroying all the evidence and ordering a league-wide communications blackout about what the Patriots may or may not have done.)

 

And now the team is suing to get the names of fans that bought or sold their tickets. Big Brother is watching in New England. And his name is Robert Kraft.