Ticketmaster Sues eBay,
StubHub Over Sales
By ETHAN SMITH
April 19, 2007; Page B5
Intensifying its long-simmering battle with the burgeoning aftermarket in concert and sporting-events tickets, Ticketmaster yesterday sued eBay Inc. and its StubHub subsidiary, alleging that the reselling site interfered with the company's contractual rights.
The suit came days after IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ticketmaster filed federal lawsuits against three ticket-broker operations and a Web site that rents software to them.
While the StubHub lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, focuses on a particular music tour, it signals Ticketmaster's growing impatience with the so-called secondary ticketing market that has blossomed in recent years as the Internet has made it easy for individuals and companies alike to buy and resell tickets originally generated by Ticketmaster.
The suit alleges that StubHub is currently selling "official premium tickets" to the coming Lynyrd Skynyrd/Hank Williams Jr. "Rowdy Frynds" tour. Sales of those tickets to the public, the lawsuit charges, violates Ticketmaster's exclusive right to sell tickets to events at the venues on the tour, including the Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis and the Palace of Auburn Hills, Mich.
The suit further charges that StubHub, in conjunction with other, unnamed parties, effectively extracted tickets from various client venues by threatening that if tickets weren't made available, those venues "might not be considered as venues for future live-entertainment events."
The suit didn't specify how many tickets were involved. But it does allege that such practices were designed "as part of a larger scheme to diminish Ticketmaster's role in the sale of tickets." Ticketmaster controls the ticket inventory to the vast majority of high-profile concerts and sporting events. Its surcharges have long been the subject of anger on the part of fans.
Ticketmaster's top price for the Rowdy Frynds tour is $70; on StubHub, 11 "official" tickets for the May 5 stop in Charleston, W.Va., were selling for $250 apiece. Ticketmaster is seeking all of StubHub's revenue from the Frynds tour, plus punitive damages and a permanent injunction preventing the rival from future business practices that it says violate its contractual rights.
A representative for Lynyrd Skynyrd couldn't be reached. A spokesman for StubHub said it would be "premature" for the company to comment because it hadn't seen the documents.
In one of the lawsuits filed earlier this week, Ticketmaster alleged that a software firm makes available to brokers digital tools designed to evade Ticketmaster. Among those tools are "bots," which can rapidly send millions of digital requests for tickets from a single computer in the same time that a human user can make only a few.
Ticketmaster executives estimate that around 10% of the most desirable sports and concert tickets are bought by scalpers rather than fans.
