Scalpers have reverse-engineered how Ticketmaster creates tickets, and are now generating and selling them on their own parallel infrastructure.

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?

  • @[email protected]English
    100•4 months ago

    I’m going to go out on a limb and say that at this point Ticketmaster might be one of the most hated company in America.

    • @[email protected]English
      68•4 months ago

      Eh…

      Bank of America, Comcast, Wells Fargo, Amazon, Google…

      Just to name a few.

      Ticketmaster is in the top 25 for sure.

      I miss old-school Consumerist and their annual Worst Company in America brackets.

      • @[email protected]English
        55•4 months ago

        Most of those have more indirect disgust. They still have some redeeming qualities for their users.

        Ticketmaster is almost universally understood to be nothing other than a petty middle man extracting fees for no reason other than they can.

      • @[email protected]English
        11•4 months ago

        I used to work for Comcast and one time after they had won the “Worst Company in the World” contest two years in a row they sent out a company-wide email telling them to participate in the contest and vote for some other company. Everyone I knew there participated in the contest but we didn’t follow the instructions exactly lol.