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Legal
Ticket reseller says German ruling not significant
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 1 June 2009
The company who own the German secondary ticketing website Ventic, who were last week seemingly ordered by a Munich court to stop the resale of tickets to the upcoming Depeche Mode tour of Germany, have said the court’s final ruling is not as significant as was claimed by the tour’s promoter, Frankfurt-based promoter Marek Lieberberg Konzertagentur, and German live music trade body VDKD.
As previously reported, it was claimed last week that the German court had banned Ventic from reselling tickets to upcoming Depeche Mode dates. The ban was based on the fact the terms and conditions of the original tickets forbid them to be resold. More than that, if and when Ventic or their parent company Smartfox Media deliberately bought Depeche Mode tickets directly off promoters MLK or their approved ticketing agent, with the intent of reselling them, and without admitting that fact to the primary ticket seller, they were guilty of “fraudulent purchase”.
However, a spokesman for Smartfox has told Billboard that while a temporary injunction did forbid the sale of any Depeche Mode tickets via Ventic, the final ruling only banned the resale of tickets that could be shown to have been acquired by this process of “fraudulent purchase”. It did not forbid Smartfox from enabling third party individuals to resell their tickets, at a mark up, nor to buy chunks of tickets off other third parties with the intent to reselling them via their Ventic website.
Billboard quote the Dutch company’s CEO Martin Josten thus: “Smartfox Media is allowed to continue selling tickets for the group Depeche Mode through the Ventic platform. The interim injunction has now been cancelled in some key points and limited to very specific tickets, [so] no longer plays a role in practice”.
This means the courts have OKed the resale of tickets by individuals or touts providing the reseller does not “fraudulently purchase” the original tickets in the first place. Although in theory that is limiting, because it means only those who genuinely intended to attend a gig but, for some reason, can’t are allowed to put tickets onto the resale market, the fact it doesn’t ban the secondary selling of tickets altogether makes the whole thing hard to police. Unless a tout buys unusually high numbers of tickets in one transaction, the effort of proving any one ticket on the secondary market was bought through a “fraudulent purchase” probably isn’t worth it.
All of which means the German ruling is not as helpful as it first seemed to those in the live music industry who resent the growth of the online ticket touting sector, and the number of ticket resale agencies and websites profiting from that growth. MLK and VDKD are yet to comment on Josten’s claims regarding the Munich court ruling.
As previously reported, Depeche Mode will resume their European tour, previously halted by frontman Dave Gahan’s ill health, in Germany on 8 Jun.
