Hacker News Reader

Comment by danhak | Hacker News Reader

This policy is against California law:

California BPC 22507: "The ticket price of any event which is canceled, postponed, or rescheduled shall be fully refunded to the purchaser by the ticket seller upon request. Any local jurisdiction may require a ticket seller to provide a bond of not more than fifty thousand dollars ($50,000) to provide for any refunds that may be required by this section." (Added by Stats. 1986, Ch. 378, Sec. 1.)

Ticketmaster is based in California. IANAL and don't know how this law might apply to events that are held elsewhere.

View on HN

My guess is Ticketmaster simply doesn't care. It's a cost of doing business for them.

Six years from now, 400,000 people will get postcards in the mail telling them that they're part of a class action settlement over this.

The class action lawyers will get second houses with third boats.

The lawyers on Ticketmaster's side will get nice bonuses for saving the company money.

The 50,000 people who actually responded to the postcard will get 53¢ each.

Ha! They'll be lucky if they get a postcard!

For years I've been getting emails, unsolicited, that have links ("Click here") that point at the likes of "www.The-XYZ-Company-class-action-settlement-for-real.com".

Are these legitimate? I have no way of knowing, since I'm not dumb enough to click them, and wouldn't trust what randos in forums say about those links. And the $4.44 settlement promises [0] do nothing to mitigate the possible ramifications of clicking through a possible phishing attempt.

[0] These settlements are always so worthless.

I have never gotten one of those that was spam. One of the ones I got was the apple google Facebook etc. wage suppression settlement. Got like 20k from that one. Dunno what would have happened if I had ignored it but it could hardly have been better than what did happen. I recommend checking those links out to see if they are legit. Just my 2c tho.

If you've never gotten a big payout from a class action it may simply reflect that you have not been in a class that was seriously injured by a wealthy company. Which isn't that surprising in a way. Companies do generally try to avoid injuring people severely, because if they don't they'll quickly be sued out of business.

> The class action lawyers will get second houses with third boats.

With money from TicketMaster. People scoff at the size of class action payouts to individuals, but if you're looking to deter bad behavior, the total money extracted is what matters.

The problem is incentives. For example, maybe TicketMaster screwed the public out of $50 million, but the lawyers are willing to settle for $10 million, of which they take home $3 million and the public distributes the rest. It's not necessarily fair and the public doesn't necessarily have an alignment of interest with the lawyers.

Ok but you are just making up fake numbers

I was the class representative for a class action suit against Sharp. When the lawyers agreed to a settlement I had the option to turn it down, but they warned me that they didn’t think they could get anything else out of them and that we’d probably lose at trial. I’m not sure what would have happened if I said no, but I heeded their advice.

The lawyers got a lot, I got a little, and everyone else got even less. From what I remember the judge presiding over the case decides how the money is split. It did end up costing Sharp a fair amount though, so that’s nice.

There are 2 other options: 1. Small claims court 2. Filing complain with California Department of Consumer Affairs

Or just do a credit card chargeback.

Small claims court is useful. They either have to pay up or show up in court, to start with. Paying up is usually cheaper. Not showing up means instant judgement for the party that shows up.

Ya but I wouldn't be surprised if the Ticketmaster TOS that you sign (click) makes you give up your suing rights in favor of arbitration or worse.

Actually I hope they do, because an arbitration DDOS will cause them much more pain than a case action.

Then everyone affected should file for an arbitration.

>The 50,000 people who actually responded to the postcard will get 53¢ each.

Based off of past TicketMaster lawsuits, they'll probably just get ticketmaster coupons.

Better than 10% off Zappos.

Less so - you can actually use the 10% coupon on Zappos. I had a huge number of credits for free concerts after the last big Ticketmaster settlment and I never once found an actual event that I could use the credit for, despite looking unceasingly. The whole thing is a joke.

I would love to see the rate of redemption on those credits. I don’t know a single person who managed to use their “free tickets”.

Just as Uber doesn't provide transport, Ticketmaster doesn't sell tickets. They characterize themselves a broker, someone facilitating sales between "Event Providers" and customers. They will pass the responsibility to concert organizers.

A lawyer would describe most "Event Providers" as judgment proof, ie too poor to be worth a lawsuit. These aren't the rockstars nor their touring companies. The event provider is the local organization who rents the venue and manages the individual concert. They are all currently shut down, employees laid off, and are likely talking to bankruptcy experts.

For example: Vancouver just cancelled its jazz festival. That festival's "event organizer" is the "Coastal Jazz & Blues Society" ... a listed non-profit. There is no blood in that stone.

Yes, I just shared this tidbit as I thought it might be helpful.

For most people, chargebacks are probably the best recourse. I've already initiated one for a festival I was supposed to attend later this spring which was cancelled outright with no refunds offered.

This is true is some circumstances but isn't universally true. Ticketmaster is part of Live Nation which both owns venues and runs tours including those in California.

So is this an attempt to isolate the responsible parties across hundreds of smaller legal entities?

Try suing Live Nation. Each tour will be spun up as a separate production, a standalone legal entity, specifically to limit such liability. Same goes with the artists, who don't work for Live Nation but rather provide their services via their own personal services companies.

Also IANAL, but its my understanding (at least under common law here in Canada) that the doctrine of privity of contract should apply here. Since the ticket purchaser only has a contract with Ticketmaster/Live Nation they should not be able to sue the 3rd party event provider, and rather are only left with the option to sue Live Nation.

They are on top of that. The purchaser does agree a contract with Ticketmaster as outlined in the "Terms of Use". It even has a Who You are Buying From section. So there are at least two contracts. One with the broker to provide the tickets, and another between the organizer and the customers as embodied in the "admit one" physical/electronic ticket. A Canadian court isn't going to destroy one agreed contract and ball it up under another.

https://help.ticketmaster.com/s/article/Purchase-Policy

"Who You Are Buying From: Ticketmaster acts as the agent to those who provide events, such as venues, teams, artist representatives and fan clubs, promoters and leagues ("Event Providers"). We generally sell tickets on behalf of our clients including artists, teams, venues, and promoters, though in some rare instances we may own a small number of tickets as part of our services contract with the individual client."

They won't be "too poor to be worth a lawsuit" if they have all the proceeds of the ticket sales, and haven't had to pay the artists.

I'm sure Ticketmaster knows this is illegal. They probably weighed their options and saw:

1) refund every ticket as required and run out of money immediately

2) do whatever they can to have some operating capital, and maybe continue existing until summer 2021-ish when live music is once again legal, then deal with a lawsuit in a time when courts are once again operating

I loathe Ticketmaster, so #1 seems fine to me, but I get their decision as a business. Honestly even #2 seems like a hail mary.

Same for Australia. You need your government to protect you from this kind of terrible behaviour.

That isn't clear-cut, at least not in NSW. The department of Fair Trading set up a series of pages which can be summarised by the quote "if the event is cancelled due to government restrictions, this impacts your rights under the consumer guarantees", followed by a plea to businesses to be nice (ha).

https://www.fairtrading.nsw.gov.au/resource-library/publicat...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com