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Comment by ikesau | Hacker News Reader

Really good post! I also found this quote which distilled their position in the 404media coverage of the situation.

> “What I can say for sure is that TicketMaster and AXS have had every opportunity to support scam-free third party ticket resale and delivery platforms if they wished: By documenting their ticket QR code cryptography, and by exposing apps and APIs which would allow verification and rotation of ticket secrets,” Conduition told me in an email. “But they intentionally choose not to do so, and then they act all surprised-pikachu when 3rd party resale scams proliferate. They're opting to play legal whack-a-mole with scammers instead of fixing the problem directly with better technology, because they make more money as a resale monopoly than as an open and secure ecosystem.”

from https://www.404media.co/scalpers-are-working-with-hackers-to...

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I dug up the court docs referenced in that article, it's pretty interesting-

AXS Group LLC v. Internet Referral Services LLC (2:24-cv-00377) District Court, C.D. California

Amended complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.91...

Docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68163191/axs-group-llc-...

One item of the complaint is regarding the "secure.tickets" site, which I wrote about in an earlier comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906148#40910690).

Basically, brokers are using the "secure.tickets" and similar websites to proxy ticket barcodes to buyers, without going through the actual ticket transfer mechanisms on the primary ticketer AXS/TM, (similar to how this blogger does). Then resellers are delivering these ticket URLs, hosted on random websites, to Seatgeek and Stubhub customers, and those platforms are supporting their delivery by telling their customers that the tickets are legit. Sounds like AXS is fighting back against this practice.

The underlying issue is that those tickets have a "no resale" provision that doesn't apply when the original seller acts as a broker.

Do other brokers, when they go and work around that limitation break the sales contact? Maybe. The legal system would churn an answer in a few years.

Do AXS et al with their "only we are allowed to engage in a secondary policy" are abusing their monopoly on original sales? The legal system would churn an answer about the legality of this in few years, but I think it's obvious they at least break rules in the spirit.

Monopoly is the keyword here. Ticketmaster and Boeing and all the other nefarious companies here use PATENTS to prevent competitors from eating their lunch. Patents need to be done away with to allow free competition, don't believe the propaganda about patents helping creators

If you don't have a patent on an invention then how do you protect it from people who will just steal what you have spent time/money creating?

Patents no longer go to individual people. They go to corporations. Perhaps we should ban corporations from getting patents on behalf of people.

That would be.. interesting from a compensation & retention (& poaching!) perspective!

So the work of 1000 people at a company may have gone into developing the tech that is to be patented, but we must restrict the patent to being owned by one single individual?

1. If you are first to market and still can't make money off your amazing invention, that might be a skill issue. 2. Patents wouldn't be as forceful if they didn't last that long. A decade or more is basically forever in a fast-moving field like tech.

>If you are first to market and still can't make money off your amazing invention, that might be a skill issue.

Sounds like something a VC would say.

Have you considered that inventing things and selling them are two different skill sets?

The patent system needs reform, not elimination.

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.

The patent system certainly needs reform, but I think more along the lines of what gets accepted as a patent. Discovering what I would describe as a 'natural law' should not be patentable (but I think happens everyday), and those ideas should not be kept from human progress, imho. There's a line between research paper and patent, that I believe is blurred for profit.

But a true invention, a novel use of those laws, should be patentable. Are you saying that if you discover a novel use of natural laws, a product that could be capitalized, your own unique idea, that you should not be able to capitalize on it? Maybe this would work in a trek economy, but not with capitalism.

If your worried about innovation, how innovative could we be if discoveries/inventions were squandered because there are no protections if you happen to even mention your idea to someone?

This is what patents used to do, but the economic and technological circumstances under which they did have changed dramatically over the last couple hundred years. All they really do now is entrench the power of the massive corporations with the capital to buy them up and sue anyone that they think encroach. It's not promoting innovation anymore, it's stifling it.

Patents can be filed for around $2000

I love it when a system has been working for hundreds of years through by far the most prosperous time in human history but people on the internet are sure it is wrong. No proof, no evidence, not even logic, just certainty.

Also, I don’t think any of the issues with Ticketmaster have anything to do with patents.

Maybe we could just reduce the patent's duration to compensate for the acceleration of information diffusion caused by the internet in the last few decades. Does that seem reasonable to you?

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 would appear by any objective measure to be doing incredibly well.

And what does any of it have to do with ticket master? They’re awful in a lot of ways, but I’m not aware of patent trolling to be one of them. If they even have and enforce patents, I’ve not heard of them, and I work in live events so I’m fairly well-informed on that company. Everyone in the industry hates them, it's unlikely they’re doing anything awful that isn’t routinely mentioned.

> 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 bargain have changed. Secrets are harder to keep, and since everything moves so much faster, any given time period is much more damaging to the commons (e.g., 20 years is forever in software).

(I also don't think Ticketmaster affairs have anything to do with patents, FWIW)

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.

It doesn’t say anything about selling patents to third parties to abuse either. It specifies authors and inventors, and rights to their writings and discoveries. At what point does it extend those rights to a random unaffiliated attorney or corporation that engages in zero productive innovation or authorship? I agree that the argument your replying to is flawed, none of this applies to Ticketmaster here specifically, but the contemporary system absolutely is broken in several ways that were seemingly never intended by its original codification.

I would support patents that could only ever belong to the actual inventor.

That’s short-sighted because it misses the fact that inventors are often not product people. There’s a big difference between creating something new and bringing it to market.

The big benefit of a functioning patent system is it allows people to make money just inventing things.

This group seems to have a “throw the baby out with the bath water” mentality when it comes to patents simply because of patent trolls, when the obvious solution is to just fix patent approval/litigation.

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.

That's an absurdly reductionist take on ancient innovation.

What about chemistry that mad everything from baking recipes, optics for physics, paint for art, forging techniques... The list goes on and on.

There are so many subtle ways of doing things that were silo'd in small communities or regions.

Yeah seriously, what patents are we talking about here? My understanding is that reason Ticketmaster is a monopoly is through deals with venues

Has been working but check out the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict and the sanctions regarding patents[1]. Russia is now allowing their companies to use patents freely.

1. https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2022/04/russian-decree-unde...

What patents does Ticketmaster have that stop competitors from selling tickets?

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