Jun. 23--For the past six decades, selling a ticket to entertainment or sporting events in Florida for more than a dollar above face value has been a second-degree misdemeanor.
But starting July 1, scalping will be legal, allowing ticket holders to resell for whatever price they can get.
Gov. Jeb Bush signed the legislation into law June 7, making Florida one of 35 states to legalize scalping.
Advocates of the law say it will create a free-market system, giving consumers more choices and creating competition.
For years, licensed ticket brokers, many of which operate solely online, haven't had much competition. They could get around the anti-scalping law by packaging tickets with things such as travel to and from the event. Their prices -- $13,875 for a courtside ticket to Game 4 of the NBA Finals in Miami last week, for example -- reflected high demand and the absence of competition.
"When you have a monopoly, what happens?" asked John K. Stargel, R-Lakeland, who sponsored the bill in the House. "You pay more. I think you've seen what the high end of the prices will be. And now there'll be more people, more tickets available and consumers will have more choices, which I think is a good thing."
Opponents of the law say it will make it more difficult for the average person to obtain tickets. Victor D. Crist, R-Tampa, the lone dissenting vote in the Senate, said tickets for popular sporting events such as the Daytona 500 or the football game between Florida and Florida State already are difficult to find.
"It's ridiculous," he said. "How does Joe Lunchbox afford to go to a concert or a game or some kind of recreational venue with a family of four when the tickets are going to pass through three hands before he gets it and everybody gets a piece just for handling it?"
Stargel said variations of House Combined Bill No. 6003 have been defeated by the state Legislature in recent years. That it passed with little debate this time is a credit to the free-market philosophy shared by Stargel and others, lobbyists for companies -- Ticketmaster, eBay and Stubhub among them -- and provisions that satisfied most of those who previously voted against it.
Under the law, for instance, it would be illegal to hoard tickets for events that have a ticket-purchase limit. It also would be illegal to resell tickets on the property of a venue such as TD Waterhouse Centre without written permission.
Florida is the only state to pass a law that makes it illegal to hoard tickets for events with purchase limits. Venues that host high-profile sporting events and concerts often place limits on how many tickets one individual can buy.
Theoretically, that would make it difficult for ticket brokers -- companies that buy large amounts of tickets to various events with the intent to profit from resale to the public -- to do business.
"A lot of the ticket brokers have hundreds of credit cards, and they've got machines that are designed to dial until they get through -- and they buy all the tickets with the intention of [selling them]," Stargel said. "We won't allow it to happen."
The law said hoarding tickets with intent to resell them at a higher price would be a violation of Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
Gary Alder, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who represents the National Association of Ticket Brokers, said his organization is in favor of a free-market system but wary of the antihoarding provision.
"The concern we had with the Florida bill was with a provision that was slipped in that has some nebulous language regarding purchase limitations," Alder said. "It's so vague, I'm not sure how it applies."
Bob Levy, a South Florida lobbyist who represents the South Florida Leisure and Entertainment Association -- a large umbrella that includes licensed ticket brokers -- thinks the new law will have negative ramifications. Levy is most concerned that legalized scalping will result in an increase of fraudulent tickets, for which no consumer protection exists.
Bill Holloway, director of ticket operations at the University of Florida, estimates that 500 people who may have purchased phony tickets were turned away from last year's football game in Jacksonville between Florida and Georgia. Some had tickets for seats and rows that did not exist in the stadium.
"Some say [the new law] is going to make tickets more affordable and more accessible to the general public," Levy said. "I would suggest au contraire. Two things will happen: Tickets will be selling for unprecedented amounts, [and] the fraud will be rampant."
Levy, who said the new law "is about the worst law that a tourist-driven state could pass," said ticket fraud could discourage high-profile events, such as the Super Bowl, from coming to Florida.
Brian McCarthy, an NFL spokesman, said individuals attempted to use about 70 counterfeit tickets for Super Bowl XL in Detroit in February. McCarthy also said the league wouldn't base the location of future Super Bowls on scalping laws.
In states where scalping is already legal, Ticketmaster offers "Ticket Exchange," a service the company thinks is a safe, secure alternative to buying scalped tickets off the street or through Internet vendors. The service allows season-ticket holders for sports franchises to resell unwanted tickets at whatever price a buyer is willing to pay.
"Now, instead of a handful of people operating illegally, who know each other, setting prices, every season-ticket holder can set the price themselves," said Kerry Samovar, the vice president of policy at Ticketmaster, which profits when people use the service. "And suddenly you have price competition. The prices will go down."
Samovar has been confronted with the arguments against legalized scalping many times.
"One would think legalizing scalping to be a bad thing," he said. "But when you dig down and spend more than two minutes on this, I have yet to encounter a person who didn't say, 'You're absolutely right, scalping is a good thing when there's consumer protection.' "
http://academic.reed.edu/economics/course_pages/201_f06/Cases/Ticket_Case/Florida.htm
hno:
