A lawsuit filed in California by concert giant AXS has revealed a legal and technological battle between ticket scalpers and platforms like Ticketmaster and AXS, in which scalpers have figured out how to extract “untransferable” tickets from their accounts by generating entry barcodes on parallel infrastructure that the scalpers control and which can then be sold and transferred to customers.
By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS.
So Ticketmaster and AXS are suing to maintain their monopoly on scalping?
I absolutely fucking hate Ticketmaster’s way of doing this, because they require access to your phone. And they won’t let me use my normal VPN, or anything that blocks them from having location access. I would rather drive to the goddamn venues–what are about 90 minutes from my home–and buy tickets in person, than to deal with Ticketmaster or AXS “security” measures that attempt to circumvent my security.
While you’re forced to use ticketmaster you can still avoid installing their app via https://am.ticketmaster.com/
When I go to that right now, from my desktop, I get:
"Your Session Has Been Suspended
Something about your browsing behavior or network made us think you were a bot.
What can I do to resolve this?
Try again from a different device or a different location
Ensure you have enabled JavaScript in your web browser
Remove any third party browser plugins that may be running"
This is because I run all my traffic through a VPN, and Ticketmaster isn’t able to harvest information from me that it wants. It expects me to allow them full access to who I am and where I am, rather than just giving me what I’m paying for.
