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A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

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Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#71

Post by matwood »

knodi123 wrote: post #39
jstanley wrote: post #8

> The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom I very much disagree. If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them. If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard f…

> If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them. And if I'm an artist who wants to ensure that fans without a lot of money can see me? Should I be allowed to offer a concert where tickets cost 20% of market value, or should "…

> And if I'm an artist who wants to ensure that fans without a lot of money can see me?

Which fans without a lot of money? How do they get picked? Lottery? Who can click the fastest? Who has no job and can stand in line for days?

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#72

Post by amelius »

mattnewton wrote: post #69
jstanley wrote: post #8

> The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom I very much disagree. If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them. If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard f…

Ticket scalping hurts artist exposure by finding an equilibrium point on price alone, where many artists may really want to maximize audience size and not earnings from tickets. Concerts are like promotional events for their brand and many people buy albums, swag, post on social media about the event, and that's all beneficial to the artist. Ticket scalping removes the ability of the artist to maximize attendance (an…

Solution: when buying a ticket, you pay an additional amount in deposit, which you receive back when you actually arrive at the venue.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#73

Post by candiodari »

darpa_escapee wrote: post #53
jstanley wrote: post #8

> The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom I very much disagree. If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them. If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard f…

> If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard fans who are willing to pay extra to secure a place would have no option. VIP tickets sold by the venue exist to solve the problem of "some fans might pay more than others to see the same show" and fans get extra value with their ticket purchase in the form of a VIP experience. Tickets sold by scalpers don't have the added value beyond the value created by their artificia…

In my experience VIP tickets sell out faster than normal ones. I'm not saying I understand it, but there you go.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#74

Post by kamikaz1k »

amelius wrote: post #72
mattnewton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ticket scalping hurts artist exposure by finding an equilibrium point on price alone, where many artists may really want to maximize audience size and not earnings from tickets. Concerts are like promotional events for their brand and many people buy albums, swag, post on social media about the event, and that's all beneficial to the artist. Ticket scalping removes the ability of the artist to maximize attendance (an…

Solution: when buying a ticket, you pay an additional amount in deposit, which you receive back when you actually arrive at the venue.

This is easily circumvented because the deposit will simply be priced into the scalped price...

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#75

Post by mattnewton »

amelius wrote: post #72
mattnewton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ticket scalping hurts artist exposure by finding an equilibrium point on price alone, where many artists may really want to maximize audience size and not earnings from tickets. Concerts are like promotional events for their brand and many people buy albums, swag, post on social media about the event, and that's all beneficial to the artist. Ticket scalping removes the ability of the artist to maximize attendance (an…

Solution: when buying a ticket, you pay an additional amount in deposit, which you receive back when you actually arrive at the venue.

That adds a lot of overhead (who is responsible for marking attendance? How is the refund managed, especially in the case of cash payments?), opens up new forms of abuse around how you count attendance, but most importantly doesn't prevent scalping from finding an equilibrium above the ability of a demographic to pay, and I am not even convinced it will stop scalpers from finding price points that have profit for them but lower attendances.

I mean, should you need a staff economist to price your concert tickets?

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#77

Post by matwood »

candiodari wrote: post #68
ctrl-j wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not the situation at hand. It's three people offering me $1000 for something, I give it to you because you're the first person. Then, you turn around and say "hey, I'm selling this for $2000 because I never wanted it in the first place!" The two other people who were waiting can't afford it. Some other guy comes along later who can afford it and pays up. It's not fair, it's one of the nasty grimy sides of…

> Scalpers are 100% middle-men who don't add value. The tickets would sell at base cost. All they do is artificially inflate the value of tickets. Economic theory would say that 1) value, in contrast to price, is personal. Everything has a different value to everyone. For instance, it's a good bet French books have more value to me than to you, because I actually speak that language. 2) inflating value is impossible.…

Good post. Everyone also seems to forget that scalpers sometimes have to sell at a loss if the event is not as popular. This is why event organizers don't mind scalpers and only pay lip service to stopping them.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#78

Post by wnevets »

jstanley wrote: post #8

> The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom I very much disagree. If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them. If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard f…

I'm hoping this post is satire.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#79

Post by [deleted] »

jstanley wrote: post #8

> The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom I very much disagree. If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them. If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard f…

[deleted]

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#80

Post by metaphorm »

jkoebler wrote: post #6

I wrote this story and am happy to answer any questions you guys might have. Lots of information I ended up not using because the article was already incredibly long or I couldn't corroborate it (but believe it to be true from various interviews), etc.

can you explain some more details about the attempt of the prosecutors to argue for "hacking" based on their (apparently wrong) assumption that Wiseguy's system was using OCR to answer a Captcha?

this part just doesn't make any sense to me. you said

> The government argued that OCR-using bots would need to use Ticketmaster's source code to be implemented properly on the site, and would therefore be a "circumvention" of Ticketmaster's software.

I don't understand why they were trying to make this argument. OCR is a sub-domain of computer vision. It involves having a program look at an image and attempt to discern alphabet characters in it. This definitely _does not_ involve accessing the source code of the system. It's interacting only with what is shown publicly to normal users.

So what gives? Why did the prosecutor try to make this argument? It's technically incorrect in a serious way.

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