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Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

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Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#691

Post by financltravsty »

brewdad wrote: post #680
financltravsty wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you artificially encumber a significant invention from benefitting the world just because you don't have the wherewithal to sell it? Seems awfully self-centered.

I mean the patent is public information. If you want to have a go at selling it, buy it or license it from me and have at it. Otherwise, invent your own idea or wait for mine to expire.

Or I could lobby for patent reform so one person doesn't hold up the progress of everyone else via selfishness.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#693

Post by mattmaroon »

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #690
TylerE wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platinum Tickets are priced by the artists who get the bulk of the revenue.

Just to back this up, Robert Smith references Platinum Tickets here https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-64975160 Choice quote: "It is a greedy scam and all artists have the choice not to participate. If no artists participated, it would cease to exist."

It doesn’t say it goes to the artists. It says artists can choose not to participate. It says most of the fees go to the venue, which is true, that’s how they get exclusivity.

Perhaps they give artists a little to encourage participation in some ancillary revenue, I don’t know. I’ve mostly worked non-TM venues. But I’m sure the promoter gets most of that too and it’s not a lot of the overall ticket sales.

I can tell you for sure, everyone but the venues feels they would get more without the monopsony. There is not a functioning market for concert promotion once you get to the 10,000+ seat level, and TM is actually even buying up the ones below that too.

Your only end run around it is the festival circuit since a lot of them are out in a field rather than a venue, but guess who is buying those up now also…

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#694

Post by mattmaroon »

TylerE wrote: post #678
mattmaroon wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don’t, that’s not how the money works in concerts. The bands get paid a flat fee by the promoter. You can Google this if you don’t believe me but I know from working with concert promoters. Why would Ticketmaster/live nation pay them at all? They don’t have to, the bands don’t have any other places to play and they make most of their income from live shows.

Platinum Tickets are priced by the artists who get the bulk of the revenue.

I am fairly sure that’s not true, and also that platinum tickets are a small percent of tickets.

Do you have a source for that statement? The article about it linked below does not back up either assertion. I’m pretty sure they’re dynamically priced by a TM algo, and I’d bet little of it goes to the artists.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#695

Post by mattmaroon »

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #690
TylerE wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platinum Tickets are priced by the artists who get the bulk of the revenue.

Just to back this up, Robert Smith references Platinum Tickets here https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-64975160 Choice quote: "It is a greedy scam and all artists have the choice not to participate. If no artists participated, it would cease to exist."

Also note how they say ticket master passes on fees to the promoter. That’s a clever way of phrasing because it makes it look like they’re not greedy, but the promoter is almost always LiveNation, which is the same company.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#696

Post by digging »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #669
digging wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the bar should be higher for bad deeds! I prefer a lower bar. I see a lot of stuff happen in the world that I really don't want to happen (on topic: privacy invasions for profit), and it's not publicly called bad nearly enough. I also thinks it's misleading and not very useful to call people good or bad, in general. I'm more comfortable with calling capitalist corporations "bad" as a blanket statements;…

Well this just sounds like more reason to use a point scale rather than calling the entire idea a waste of time. In particular 'slightly less evil' is not the goal.

> Well this just sounds like more reason to use a point scale rather than calling the entire idea a waste of time.

Again, I think we're kind of on the same page, but our solutions are different. The original question refused any kind of nuance, and we both seem to agree it's not a question that should ignore nuance. You choose to answer a binary question with a grading system, I choose to substitute a different question.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#697

Post by massysett »

Sesse__ wrote: post #689
mattmaroon wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem are we trying to solve? Why do we think there is a problem? If the idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to innovate, and since the system has been put in place humans have been exponentially more innovative than they were before, why do we think it needs fixing? Nothing seems reasonable to me on the topic unless it comes with evidence as to how it would improve a system that wo…

> If the idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to innovate No, it wasn't. The idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to be _open_. Patents are a trade with the commons; you would give up your secrets for a limited time period of exclusivity. People would innovate with or without patents, but they would keep that innovation to themselves. With software, both sides of…

U.S. Constitution at least seems to side with innovation, not openness. Constitution article 1 section 8 says Congress shall have power

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

This says nothing about publication, only about progress and exclusivity.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#698

Post by mattmaroon »

Sesse__ wrote: post #689
mattmaroon wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem are we trying to solve? Why do we think there is a problem? If the idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to innovate, and since the system has been put in place humans have been exponentially more innovative than they were before, why do we think it needs fixing? Nothing seems reasonable to me on the topic unless it comes with evidence as to how it would improve a system that wo…

> If the idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to innovate No, it wasn't. The idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to be _open_. Patents are a trade with the commons; you would give up your secrets for a limited time period of exclusivity. People would innovate with or without patents, but they would keep that innovation to themselves. With software, both sides of…

That is an ahistorical view of the history of patents. Openness had never even occurred to anybody when patents were originally invented. Back then, it didn’t matter. Humanity hadn’t come up with much that you couldn’t figure out how it worked if you had one in your hands. It may have taken millennia to invent movable type, for example, but somebody who saw it could have copied it immediately. Its relatively recent that that has not been the case for almost anything.

It was developed to spur innovation, and that is still its main function.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#699

Post by projektfu »

It's a little bizarre to me that they are annoyed at being dependent on the signal but want to avoid Google Wallet because ... privacy? What privacy do they have so far? I can understand keeping your credit cards off of it, because Google is obviously getting a list of all your purchases. But there's nothing really private about having a ticket to a concert through Ticketmaster. They "take your privacy seriously" and sell your information to commercial partners and send you offers of things they think you're interested in.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#700

Post by crote »

oehpr wrote: post #52
cogman10 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I have to believe the reason the likes of ticket master isn't fixing this is because they are selling/auctioning/reserving some percentage of tickets to scalpers or "3rd party sellers". Requiring ID is such an obvious solution that I have to believe these convoluted approaches are only there so the secondary market can exist and so ticket master can wash their hands when prices get out of control on that market.

I have to presume that the driving impetus of all of this is that they're trying to avoid the actual requirement of checking the ID. Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions. But I mean, obviously, any kind of system like this strikes me as the same sort of thing as DRM. That you can somehow protect the message from the person you're sharing the message to. How can you avoid reselling if you…

> Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions.

But they in turn greatly degraded the flow of traffic by forcing the use of a proprietary always-online app which fails to load when your cellular connection is less-than-ideal. Verifying a photo ID would probably be faster.

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