The New England Patriots have won the right to get all the names of fans who bought or sold, or who tried to buy or sell, tickets to home games through the online ticket reseller, StubHub.
The Patriots filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts against the San Francisco based StubHub, an eBay subsidiary, claiming that the website encouraged ticket holders to violate team ticket policies and break state laws.
After losing their appeal in the lawsuit last week StubHub gave the Patriots 13,000 names.
Patriots tickets on the 50-yard line have been offered on StubHub for the December 16th game against the Jets for $1,300.05 on Stub Hub as of Thursday. The face value of those tickets are $125.
Massachusetts state law prohibits a resale of more than $2 over face value plus some service charges.
The team has a set of ticket resale rules for season ticket holders and in the past has revoked season tickets for trying to profit off of ticket resales. They also have their own resale site, TeamExchange, which resells tickets for season ticket holders at face value through Ticketmaster.
StubHub claimed the Patriots are trying to start a monopoly on their own tickets, while the Patriots are saying they are trying to get their fans the tickets at a reasonable price and are entitled to know who is breaking the rules.
“One of our claims against StubHub is that knowing we have rules against resale on the Internet, they are out there soliciting people to violate our rules,” said Daniel Goldberg, a lawyer for the team. “In order to pursue that claim, we need to understand who has been persuaded by that inducement to list their tickets [on StubHub].”
The Patriots say the rules are clearly printed on the back of every ticket they sell.
The team has not said how it would use the information in won court but I’d imagine knowing how vigorously they have pursued ticket violations in the past that they will be checking the names against their season ticket holders list and then revoking those tickets. It wouldn’t also be outside the realm of possibility of checking the waiting list and banning those who tried to circumvent the teams ticket policy.
