Mass. debates regulation of paperless tickets

With paper tickets becoming outdated, major arenas and venues are beginning to utilize electronic ticketing. A bill proposed in the House of Representatives on Tuesday would address the demand for increased regulation of that new service.

If passed, the bill would provide guidelines for paperless ticketing and insure other customer rights, including requiring venues to disclose the amount of tickets available for the public to purchase.

Jon Potter, president of the Fan Freedom Project, a group trying to gain support for this piece of legislation and other bills like it across the country, said he sees the bill as necessary for the preservation of customers’ rights – in particular, the ability to resell tickets through services like Craigslist or ticket aggregating sites.

“Our tickets are our property,” Potter said. “Once we purchase a ticket, we can share it or sell it any way . . . and at any price.”

Paperless tickets, Potter said, threaten these rights. He added that electronic tickets are restrictive because they are extremely difficult to resell legitimately.

“It is often the case that consumers with paperless tickets are prohibited from offering tickets below face value,” he said.

Paperless tickets are also more difficult to give as gifts, he said, because many paperless tickets require the purchaser’s credit card and photo identification.

“If adopted by local sports teams’ venues, paperless tickets would threaten today’s healthy and energetic competition between Ace, StubHub and other resellers,” he said.

Frank Fernandez, who testified at the hearing, said he supports the bill and its passage, and that he has often sold tickets last minute through various online sources.

“[If] restrictive ticketing practices were adopted by the teams and ticket issuers like Ticketmaster,” he said, “they will push their re-sales onto an exchange they own or prefer, and I will lose this convenience.”

Opponents of the bill, such as Jeff Kline, president of digital ticketing service Veritix, said that paperless tickets are far from restrictive.

He said he and his colleagues believe that customers have the right to buy and sell tickets, and that paperless ticketing does not prevent them from doing so.

Potter said that the bill’s opponents are only interested in maximizing revenue.

“If the consumer loses as a result of that, that’s not their interest,” he said.

Rep. Michael Moran of Brighton, a sponsor of the bill, said that the ticket costs are “astronomical” and that since the industry has changed, the laws around it must change as well.

Aneri Desai, a Boston University College of Arts and Sciences freshman, said that she does not like the idea of a electronic ticket.

“I just bought a ticket to go see a play and I feel a lot better having the actual paper ticket rather than an electronic or paperless one,” she said.