Obama signs law making ticket buying bots illegal - hopeful news for music lovers

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**jreilly89**

This is big news for anyone who struggles to buy tickets online. Today, President Obama has signed the “Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act of 2016 which makes it illegal to use software to purchase tickets online. While New York already passed this legistlature, President Obama has made it nationwide. The idea is that it will prevent those whose end goal is to resell them at a higher price.

Under the law, it is illegal for anyone or company to use a bot or software to circumvent the rules for making a fair purchase such as buying more tickets than specified. It is also illegal to resell tickets that were purchased with the help of the bot. With this law, it makes the person(s) and those who know how the tickets were purchased liable.

This law comes much overdue with tickets for many shows and festivals selling out immediately only to be found in the masses on resale sites. According to the BOTS Act, this gives the state government power to bring civil suits on behalf of the residents in which they can seek to receive damages or other forms of compensation for the affected residents. Finally, the law gives the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) the power to participate when needed in those civil cases as well.

http://bythewavs.com/president-obama-signs-better-online-ticket-sales-bots-act-2016/

Let's hope they can actually enforce it. If so, I'd be stoked for this. Too many concerns get ruined by fething scammers.

**Co'tor Shas**

Good, the donkey-caves who do this sort of gak should be stopped. It's forcibly inserting an uneasily middle-man.

**whembly**

A rare good thing from Obama.

As a music festival attendee... this makes me happy.

**LordofHats**

Don't even care that resale is illegal.

Using a bot to snipe tickets?

It's just a dick move.

**malamis**

Speaking as a constructor of bots for benign and hostile purposes...

How would this law stop the slack being picked up by foreign companys instead?

**Frazzled**

malamis wrote:
Speaking as a constructor of bots for benign and hostile purposes...

How would this law stop the slack being picked up by foreign companys instead?

WE need a wall to protect our domestic bots from foreign bots taking our jobs!

**whembly**

malamis wrote:
Speaking as a constructor of bots for benign and hostile purposes...

How would this law stop the slack being picked up by foreign companys instead?

It won't stop any companies from botting... what it does, it forces the ticket sellers to abide by industry anti-botting measures and allows people to take these botters to court.

<-- I.T. geek here... what language do you use? (I've used perl, and AutoIT). Learned AutoIT back in my diablo2 days.

**malamis**

Frazzled wrote:
malamis wrote:
Speaking as a constructor of bots for benign and hostile purposes...

How would this law stop the slack being picked up by foreign companys instead?

WE need a wall to protect our domestic bots from foreign bots taking our jobs!

Exactly my point

If US citizens can't scalp their own countrymen, then all the, lets say, Singapore Entrepeneurs who were crowded out of the market can now muscle in.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

whembly wrote:
malamis wrote:
Speaking as a constructor of bots for benign and hostile purposes...

How would this law stop the slack being picked up by foreign companys instead?

It won't stop any companies from botting... what it does, it forces the ticket sellers to abide by industry anti-botting measures and allows people to take these botters to court.

<-- I.T. geek here... what language do you use? (I've used perl, and AutoIT). Learned AutoIT back in my diablo2 days.

+1 Perl

I did inventory and automated testing with raw XML and similar, but recently started with Win32::GuiTest for applications which are horrible/written in Java.

**Orlanth**

LordofHats wrote:
Don't even care that resale is illegal.

Using a bot to snipe tickets?

It's just a dick move.

I disagree, I can usually make sure I am on a computer at activation time, usually 9am, but not everyone can do this. Different shift patterns or no computer access at work means no tickets for you, a bot can fix that.
Bot purchase should be legal, but limited. Also people use bots to beat the bots, an honest user can set a bot to buy a ticket just as a tout can. Obama has this law right by criminalising resale of bot purchased tickets, not prohibiting the use of bots

**Herzlos**

LordofHats wrote:
Don't even care that resale is illegal.

Using a bot to snipe tickets?

It's just a dick move.

Our main UK ticket retailer goes one further, in that they also run and integrate a site that lets you sell (and presumably re-issue) tickets to events. I was trying to get tickets for an event and within 8 minutes of launch it was largely sold out from the main first-hand site with an advert for their own reseller selling tickets that must have been bought and listed within the 8 minutes from launch.

**jreilly89**

Orlanth wrote:
LordofHats wrote:
Don't even care that resale is illegal.

Using a bot to snipe tickets?

It's just a dick move.

I disagree, I can usually make sure I am on a computer at activation time, usually 9am, but not everyone can do this. Different shift patterns or no computer access at work means no tickets for you, a bot can fix that.
Bot purchase should be legal, but limited. Also people use bots to beat the bots, an honest user can set a bot to buy a ticket just as a tout can. Obama has this law right by criminalising resale of bot purchased tickets, not prohibiting the use of bots

If bots weren't there to snipe tickets, people wouldn't bots to beat bots. That's just simple logic. Point is, if you want to use a bot to buy tickets, there should be a limt (let's say 4). Otherwise, you're (usually) just buying all the tickets to resell them at exorbitant prices. Pretty dick move.

**Herzlos**

Or you can use a bot to buy as many tickets as you want, as long as you don't re-sell them.

That said, if bots didn't clear out all of the tickets within minutes of release, there'd be less incentive to use a bot to grab a ticket.

**Orlanth**

jreilly89 wrote:
Orlanth wrote:
LordofHats wrote:
Don't even care that resale is illegal.

Using a bot to snipe tickets?

It's just a dick move.

I disagree, I can usually make sure I am on a computer at activation time, usually 9am, but not everyone can do this. Different shift patterns or no computer access at work means no tickets for you, a bot can fix that.
Bot purchase should be legal, but limited. Also people use bots to beat the bots, an honest user can set a bot to buy a ticket just as a tout can. Obama has this law right by criminalising resale of bot purchased tickets, not prohibiting the use of bots

If bots weren't there to snipe tickets, people wouldn't bots to beat bots. That's just simple logic. Point is, if you want to use a bot to buy tickets, there should be a limt (let's say 4). Otherwise, you're (usually) just buying all the tickets to resell them at exorbitant prices. Pretty dick move.

Sorry no. Tickets selling out in the first hours of sale predates the internet. Bots level the playing field as you don't need to be online at the start of sale, bots are frankly necessary for anyone who cannot make the start time. What you need to do is limit sales volume per customer not limit use of bots.

**jreilly89**

Orlanth wrote:
jreilly89 wrote:
Orlanth wrote:
LordofHats wrote:
Don't even care that resale is illegal.

Using a bot to snipe tickets?

It's just a dick move.

I disagree, I can usually make sure I am on a computer at activation time, usually 9am, but not everyone can do this. Different shift patterns or no computer access at work means no tickets for you, a bot can fix that.
Bot purchase should be legal, but limited. Also people use bots to beat the bots, an honest user can set a bot to buy a ticket just as a tout can. Obama has this law right by criminalising resale of bot purchased tickets, not prohibiting the use of bots

If bots weren't there to snipe tickets, people wouldn't bots to beat bots. That's just simple logic. Point is, if you want to use a bot to buy tickets, there should be a limt (let's say 4). Otherwise, you're (usually) just buying all the tickets to resell them at exorbitant prices. Pretty dick move.

Sorry no. Tickets selling out in the first hours of sale predates the internet. Bots level the playing field as you don't need to be online at the start of sale, bots are frankly necessary for anyone who cannot make the start time. What you need to do is limit sales volume per customer not limit use of bots.

No, that's just wrong. If you limit the volume of sales, then you don't need to be there at the start time. You can sally up a day, two days or whenever after the sale and buy a ticket. Using bots (with limited sales volume) would just be laziness.

And tickets selling out does predate the internet, but it's called scalpers. Scalpers aren't gone, they've just updated their sales tactics to include bots.

**MrMoustaffa**

About freaking time. I remember when I bought tickets for an AC/DC concert on the black ice tour the tickets were sold out in literally seconds.

But then a ton of other websites "magically" had tickets available for about triple the damn price.

**Orlanth**

jreilly89 wrote:
Orlanth wrote:
jreilly89 wrote:
Orlanth wrote:
LordofHats wrote:
Don't even care that resale is illegal.

Using a bot to snipe tickets?

It's just a dick move.

I disagree, I can usually make sure I am on a computer at activation time, usually 9am, but not everyone can do this. Different shift patterns or no computer access at work means no tickets for you, a bot can fix that.
Bot purchase should be legal, but limited. Also people use bots to beat the bots, an honest user can set a bot to buy a ticket just as a tout can. Obama has this law right by criminalising resale of bot purchased tickets, not prohibiting the use of bots

If bots weren't there to snipe tickets, people wouldn't bots to beat bots. That's just simple logic. Point is, if you want to use a bot to buy tickets, there should be a limt (let's say 4). Otherwise, you're (usually) just buying all the tickets to resell them at exorbitant prices. Pretty dick move.

Sorry no. Tickets selling out in the first hours of sale predates the internet. Bots level the playing field as you don't need to be online at the start of sale, bots are frankly necessary for anyone who cannot make the start time. What you need to do is limit sales volume per customer not limit use of bots.

No, that's just wrong. If you limit the volume of sales, then you don't need to be there at the start time. You can sally up a day, two days or whenever after the sale and buy a ticket. Using bots (with limited sales volume) would just be laziness.

And tickets selling out does predate the internet, but it's called scalpers. Scalpers aren't gone, they've just updated their sales tactics to include bots.

That sounds all well and good, but it doesn't work. Having a squeeze of raw volume of sale, just means that resellers snap up the tickets that are available, and when the next batch becomes available the bot can handle that and snap up those tickets too.

Instead what ticket sellers should do is introduce limitation on volume of individual sale. You could use tests to remove bots, but bots themselves arent the problem, volume traders are. This can be achieved by limiting number of tickets purchased by account and by having a timer on the purchase cycle. Th timer need not be long, only fifteen seconds or so. Anyone trying to buy up the venue will find the accumulative time delay before they can add more tickets will quickly get impractical.