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Michael Cooney

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Patriots get online names from StubHub, set off privacy battle

By Layer 8 on Thu, 10/18/07 - 10:53pm.

The New England Patriots football team has won a court case to get the name of 13,000 people who have bought or sold Pats tickets through the ticket-selling website StubHub.

The club says it wants to use the names to crack down on what it calls illegal ticket sales. Ticket holders are not allowed to resell tickets for profit and the Patriots do let fan resell tickets for the list price at the Patriots' own TicketExchange Web site.

With the ruling from Suffolk County, Mass. judge Allan van Gestel, the Patriots could now use the information -which has reportedly already been turned over to the team - to cancel tickets of violators or cut off season ticket holders who have resold tickets. Prosecution of those ticket buyers and sellers is also possible but the team has not said exactly what it will do with the information.

Patriots tickets have been offered on StubHub at prices many times higher, including two 50-yardline seats for New England's Dec. 16 game against AFC rival New York Jets listed Thursday for $1,300.05 each, the Associated Press reported. Their face value is $125.

At least one group sees the Patriots victory as a loss of privacy for the fans. "The Patriots, just at the beginning of the season, were filming opposing teams and accused of surveillance and given a slap from the National Football League about that. Now they're turning the cameras on their fans, so clearly there is a lack of understanding about what privacy is," said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group in an Associated Press interview. He said the court's order to turn over the names infringes on the privacy rights of Patriots fans.

The dispute between the two entities started last November when the Patriots sued StubHub alleging the ticket resellers encouraged fans to ignore Massachusetts anti-scalping law and the team's prohibition against reselling Patriots tickets for a profit. StubHub filed a countersuit against the Patriots in December, alleging the team was attempting to monopolize the ticket resale market by revoking the tickets of anyone caught reselling them anywhere but on the club's own TeamExchange website.

Some professional leagues have avoided such problems with StubHub. Major League Baseball this year signed an agreement with StubHub that makes it the official secondary ticket reseller for MLB.

EBay has owned StubHub since it acquired the firm in January for about $310 million in cash. StubHub started in 2000, designed to match buyers and sellers of tickets for live sports and entertainment events, within the boundaries of anti-scalping laws in force in most states. EBay said the acquisition will help to strengthen its own online ticket offerings. The move also eliminates a strong competitor in the online ticket resale sector.