Event tickets and consumer protection in the digital age: a socio-legal investigation.

Event tickets are sought after commodities and demand for them often outstrips supply. The result of this is the emergence of a secondary ticket market that negatively impacts on consumers. It inflates the price of the tickets and the contested legality of the resale places the consumer at a risk of being denied entry to the event. The secondary ticket market is an unregulated space that offers few protections to consumers. The overarching aim of this project is to provide clarity on the legal status of an event ticket so that the secondary market can be regulated effectively in a way that provides appropriate protections to consumers and a fair marketplace. The project will advance socio-legal inquiry of event tickets and contribute to the timely debate with robust empirical insights. To do this, we need to understand what an event ticket is, and what its ownership allows consumers to do with it. Recent furores around the sale and distribution of event tickets illustrate their cultural, legal, and economic significance, and highlight the potential problems associated with their distribution and the remedies available for redress. While there has been some legislative, Parliamentary (Waterson 2016), academic (James and Osborn, 2016a & b), and consumer group activity (including Fan Fair Alliance, Face-Value European Alliance for Ticketing and Victim of Viagogo) around matters relating to tickets, there is a lack of understanding of their legal definition, as evidenced by the workings of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Ticket Abuse, before which the project team have presented evidence from their earlier work. Now is the ideal time for this research, as the transition to digital ticketing continues. Our specific objectives are to: (1) provide a clear statement of the legal properties of an event ticket; (2) analyse the justifications for regulating the secondary ticketing market; (3) explore the role and impact of ticketing technologies on the operation and regulation of the secondary ticketing market; and (4) propose solutions, including developing a new digital platform that will both educate consumers and provide a pathway to dispute resolution. This project will help define the legal status of an event ticket, the legality of the terms and conditions most used to prevent their resale, and offer consumer-focussed solutions from a legal and extra-legal perspective. Key to the project's outcomes is to ensure that consumers are better educated before they interact with the secondary market and that any future regulation of tickets' sale and resale is based on a clear understanding of what a ticket is and what can be done with it. The Digital Hub will be the fulcrum of the public outputs. It will act as both educational tool to empower consumers and provide a pathway to the resolution of ticket-related disputes. It will be made freely available to consumers via consumer advice group Consumer Friend and partner websites.