[ssl-3]

Non-transferable tickets suck for their own reasons.

Someone in a group gets sick or otherwise can't make it? Their seat is now either empty, or their ticket goes back to the pool. They can't give that ticket to someone else.

That's a big deal for a whole slew of reasons. Let's pick just one reason and run with it.

Five 11-year-old-ish girls want to go see Olivia Rodrigo. These kids haven't ever even been inside an arena before and aren't experienced enough to go on their own, and the tickets are expensive. One of the moms of the group decides that she'll take them all. No problem, right?

Except: This mom gets sick. She can't go.

And she can't just give her ticket to one of the other moms or dads because it is non-transferable. And the kids still aren't big enough to turn loose in a crowd without an adult.

The end result of this is stupid: "Sorry, kids. None of you get to go to the concert that you already have a ticket for. Life is hard."

[EdgeExplorer]

This is a pretty niche problem compared to the every-ticket-of-every-big-show scalper problem. This affects <1% of ticket buyers. Scalpers currently affect 100%. Seems like a pretty reasonable trade-off.

Also, solvable. Everyone needs an ID that matches ticket or to be accompanied by someone with an ID that matches a ticket purchased in the same transaction (cap number of non-ID tickets per ID ticket, don't let people appearing over 30 in on a non-ID ticket). Then, when buying tickets, allow specifying a named alternate for each ID ticket in case the person can't make it.

[ssl-3]

That's one problem.

I can think of many other instances of other problems.

If you cannot do so, then you aren't really following along very well.

[paintbox]

How many solutions can you think of?

[LeoPanthera]

The UK is proposing a law that will make it illegal to resell a ticket for greater than the face value.

That honestly seems like a very pragmatic solution to me.

[makeitdouble]

I don't know how naive the actual wording is, but fighting these kind of resells is an arms race.

If for instance they allow reselling the ticket at the same price, processing fees could be exempted from that calculation. So charging the nominal price, but with enormous fees that go to the seller's pocket in a roundabout way will work.

If processing fees are caped, the seller can request payment through a middle item that is nominally valued the same as the ticket but can actually be paid for more.

Or the reseller will accept generous tips in exchange for the ticket at the nominal price. etc. etc.

As long as there's someone willing to pay, money will find the way to the reseller.

[pjerem]

Except you are losing yourself in technicalities, technicalities which court will not care about. Most judicial systems (including UK) are based on both letter AND spirit of the law : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law

Most courts will not convict your only for your actions but for the intention that fulfilled your actions. That's also why in most countries, murder and attempted murder will have the same consequences.

So you can hide your fees however you want, the court will interpret your intentions, and you'll have a hard time justifying your $250 processing fee for reselling a concert ticket.

[titanomachy]

Enforcement of small-scale commerce is hard, black markets exist, people will go advertise on shady sites if they have to.

Imagine you've instituted this ban, and some concert has face-value $100 tickets that now have $400 market value. The reality isn't going to be "there's now lots of $100 tickets available on StubHub", it's going to be "StubHub has no tickets, and some shady black-market website has tickets available for $400 with no consumer protections".

That said, I'm not totally against this world, since all of these inconveniences will add friction and make it less attractive and profitable to buy and scalp lots of tickets. But since I often find out about concerts kind of late, I'm also happy that there's tickets available for me at any price. I'd probably end up going to fewer concerts if we killed the legal resale market.

[seanalltogether]

Ireland has this and honestly I hate it now. It's impossible to get tickets unless you win the lottery to buy them when they first go on sale. Paying a premium to buy them on the second hand market sucked, but at least I could make that calculation and decide which bands I was willing to pay to actually see. Now, I can't see any of the big bands anymore. I just wish they'd reserve like 1/3 of the tickets for an auction system or something.

[left-struck]

Well it seems like it’s still an excellent idea to have laws like this in place but like you say also have some tickets that sell at an auctioned price

[ndsipa_pomu]

Seems like that would be an easy thing to bypass. Include a free ticket with some overpriced merchandise. £600 for a T-shirt, but you get a free ticket with it.

[pjerem]

See there : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233142

[lopis]

So the scalpers will move to the black market and consumers will lose all existing protections? Nice!

[djaro]

Some scalpers will move to the black market. Most will quit. People dont want to go to jail.

[lopis]

Will depend entirely on enforcement I guess

[ssl-3]

"Great news, gentlemen! We've made [drugs/gambling/guns/scalping] illegal! That problem is solved!"

[onion2k]

Perfect is the enemy of good. If a law can end the easier parts of the problem then the overwhelming majority of the issues go away.

For example, the UK banned the private ownership of 'short guns' in 1997 and there hasn't been a mass shooting since. The second order effect of that was an increase in knife crime, but that's OK (in the sense that it's another problem to deal with). Trading fighting gun crime for fighting knife crime is a huge win if it removes a problem like random mass shootings.

In this case, removing all of the incentives for legal ticket scalping at source would mean people can mostly benefit from access to tickets. The second order effects are likely to be an increase in ticket prices because now people with more money will be willing to pay more at source, and an increase in 'sniping' services that automate buying as fast as possible. Those are acceptable downsides if it removes people from the market who only skim profits by scalping and offer no useful additions.

[ssl-3]

The UK has done amazingly well at removing short guns from society. It was perhaps erroneous of me to include that.

But do you really think that selling/having illicitly overpriced concert tickets will have the same domestic ire as illicitly selling/having a short gun does? Will the incentive really be gone?

Or do you think that perhaps it will be seen ~the same as selling/having some weed is, instead?

[onion2k]

Will the incentive really be gone?

The incentive will remain, but doing it at scale will be much harder. That automatically reduces the scale of the problem to what individuals (or small groups) can do. Essentially the law is stopping the mechanisation of scalping rather than scalping itself. That's probably good enough.

[LeoPanthera]

This seems unnecessarily cynical.

[ssl-3]

It may be the case that your perspective differs from my own. I've gambled, and bought drugs, and done all kinds of other illegal things in my life.

I knew that it was illegal. I did it anyway.

I haven't bought or sold any illegally-overpriced concert tickets yet, but I'm not yet done living my life, either.

[hdgvhicv]

Good example. In the U.K. many guns are illegal and schools don’t get shot up. In the us they are legal and school frequently get shot up.

[mattalex]

Then allow resale through the platform at the original purchase price.

You still have no scalping, but you recover the ability to back out due to unforeseen events

[registeredcorn]

If there were a caveat for something like that, like say, "adult supervision for minors is required. Transfer between legal guardians is permitted, provided they can prove ..." or some kind of language like that.

Are there other common cases that would apply? I assume there are probably some other situations, but I can't think of what they might be. I also find it hard to understand why a little bit of leeway couldn't be baked into the language of the transferable nature under certain circumstances. Presumably the venue wants people to have a good time so they will want to come back again and again, right?

Perhaps something as easy as "If one friend can't make it, you can give it to a different friend." Then, at the door, the guards can look at the ID of someone and ask basic questions; "What is (person)'s name? What town does (person) live in?" Etc.

[ssl-3]

So how do those rules work, exactly?

How do we even prove that the kids are kids? How do we prove that the kids even exist?

> or some kind of language like that.

There's nothing accomplished here but handwaving and added burden.

---

> Perhaps something as easy as "If one friend can't make it, you can give it to a different friend." Then, at the door, the guards can look at the ID of someone and ask basic questions; "What is (person)'s name? What town does (person) live in?" Etc.

In this second scenario, scalping goes like this: "For sale: Two tickets to $hot_show. Entry instructions provided upon delivery."

And then the buyer buys the tickets at whatever that price is, and goes to the show. They give their ID, the "guards" ask them basic questions, and they answer those questions. After that, they get turned loose inside like every other concert-goer.

This is just handwaving and extra burden, as well.

---

Unless... unless we make it totally Gestapo-like. Because the best part of going to see a show is the lengthy interrogation that happens beforehand. (If the goal is to make shows less popular, then this is a sure-fire way to improve that metric!)

[hunter2_]

An actual transfer is needed when selling to someone you don't know/trust. But for the moms in your example, handing over the ticket just means temporarily handing over the account: share the password (assuming no password reuse habits), send over the MFA OTP, whatever it takes.

It's not ideal, but it avoids the scalping that comes from more streamlined transfers; scalpers can't easily sell burner accounts if account creation needs a non-VoIP phone number or similar.

[ssl-3]

That doesn't work, either. We can't assume that mom-passwords aren't being reused. We can't assume that mom-phones are secure. We can't assume that the requisite moms are even aware of the same kinds of things that we here on HN are aware of.

We can't assume anything, except this promotes a new friction.

But even then: So we're letting anyone in with a valid ticket-holding account on a pocket supercomputer, without verifying that they are who they say they are?

Great! This means that the scalpers have moved on from just selling tickets, and pivot over to selling entire ticket-holding accounts.

(This is just more theatrical burden.)

[hunter2_]

> We can't assume that mom-passwords aren't being reused. We can't assume that mom-phones are secure. We can't assume that the requisite moms are even aware of the same kinds of things that we here on HN are aware of.

Fair enough. So rather than mom1 telling mom2 how to use mom1's account on mom2's device, mom1 lets mom2 borrow mom1's device for the show. Not her main phone where everything is logged in, but a tickets-only device where the only thing she logged into was the ticketing app.

> this promotes a new friction.

Yes, but again, the alternative is letting scalpers have their way.

> So we're letting anyone in with a valid ticket-holding account on a pocket supercomputer, without verifying that they are who they say they are?

Yes, this is how tickets work. If you show ID, it's to be able to drink, and you're doing that with a different employee than the one who takes your ticket. Note that I'm not talking about will-call or guest list entry, I'm talking about arriving with a ticket. The shift from "dumb" paper/email/PDF tickets that can be shared freely to "smart" tickets that require an app that mixes something TOTP-like into your ticket isn't for the venue to know your identity, it's to prevent multiple people from showing up with the same ticket following improper duplication.

> This means that the scalpers have moved on from just selling tickets, and pivot over to selling entire ticket-holding accounts.

No, because creating an account requires a non-SIP phone number.

[ssl-3]

Jesus. So mom1 now has two phones, just in case she gets sick and can't take the kids to the party.

I stopped reading after that. I'm not sorry.

[hunter2_]

I was fine with the earlier method which doesn't need that. I only concocted an alternative to address your disgust with it! The ID verification part that you skipped is much more interesting anyway.

[haritha-j]

Reminds me of how there are people selling single game steam accounts now, to take advantage of regional pricing.

[maxboone]

That doesn't solve anything, you can just create event-specific accounts as a scalper (which you can reset after the event has happened).

Non-transferable tickets are bound to a specific name iiuc.

[well_ackshually]

Tough fucking luck. I missed out on Alive 2007 because I was too young, on Lady Gaga because my partner got sick and we had to resell the tickets (at the exact same price we bought them for. And someone else bought them for that exact same price). Will I ever see Muse? Fuck if I know.

> The end result of this is stupid: "Sorry, kids. None of you get to go to the concert that you already have a ticket for. Life is hard."

Life is hard and they missed Olivia Rodrigo. The kids will survive through it, I promise. It's life, they'll see another concert. Most children in the world do not go to see concerts at 11 either.

[ssl-3]

Understood: Kids aren't important.

Or perhaps: The suffering is the point.

Copy! Over!

[well_ackshually]

Kids aren't important when you're trying to make everyone's lives worse, indeed.

I sure hope I wont't find anything in your history protesting against widespread surveillance, because as we know, its's to protect the children. But you're not a hypocrite picking and choosing your arguments to make shitty points on HN, right ?

[ssl-3]

> Kids aren't important when you're trying to make everyone's lives worse, indeed.

Understood it the first time, thanks: Kids aren't important. Their feelings might not even be real; and even if they are real, then the disappointment will just toughen them up (the suffering is the point).

I do not agree with what I think you're repeating, but I do believe that I've heard it twice, now.

> I sure hope I wont't find anything in your history protesting against widespread surveillance, because as we know, its's to protect the children. But you're not a hypocrite picking and choosing your arguments to make shitty points on HN, right ?

Go ahead and dig around. My writings here are an open book. My words can live in your head for as long as you want them to.

You don't need me to tell you that you're free to make as many comparisons as you wish, regardless of any incongruity in those comparisons. You're a free-thinking adult like [most of] the rest of us here on HN are.

What say you?

[ffaccount2]

How is this different from, let's say, plane tickets?

And nobody says that tickets must not be cancelable. Just no reselling on your own.

[willsmith72]

Let's not make air travel the customer experience bar for anything please