Do you think you should be able to pay as much as you want for a ticket to a Red Sox game, a performance of CATS, a Damien Rice concert? (For example …)
In Massachusetts, you can’t resell tickets for whatever price you want – you’re limited to $2 over the price printed on the ticket (with certain exceptions).
This story comes up every springtime, around Opening Day.
The law is supposed to limit scalping –
It’s supposed to benefit consumers, and also to benefit the promoters and performers, right? Scalpers are taking money out of their pockets.
In a free-market economy, however, should there be any limits on what you can do with something you, yourself, own?
New York State is reconsidering its anti-scalping law.
Ticket touting is set to become legal in New York when the state’s anti-scalping law expires in June.
[Broadway theater owners] are now proposing that a law be created where state-licensed organizations can resell tickets for an unlimited profit, based on the idea that the prices would not increase dramatically.
They are reasoning that a simultaneous increase in the number of resellers would actually increase competition, which would result in lower prices.
State Governor Eliot Spitzer explained to the New York Post his reason for proposing the law change, saying: “My view has always been that the laws don’t work.
“The reason the laws don’t work is it’s the only product I know where we are regulating the secondary market but we don’t set a price for the primary market. It makes no sense.”
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, companies resell tickets at their own risk:
A Quincy District Court judge last week indicated he plans to force a Weymouth ticket reseller accused of violating the antiscalping law to identify one of its key ticket suppliers. Admit One Ticket Agency LLC, which operates online as RedSoxTix.com, said giving up the name of its supplier would be devastating to its business.
A Kenmore Square ticket agency is warning that a strict interpretation of the antiscalping law at a state regulatory hearing later this month could drive it and every other reseller out of business.
Source: Touting to become legal in New York? – NME.com
Also: Selling tickets? If so, watch out – By Bruce Mohl, The Boston Globe
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