HFN

Human Filtered News

Tuesday, December 19, 2006
inthemix | News | Big Day Out gets the smackdown from eBay: "In a result described by organisers as “a win to the legal system over commonsense-logic”, the Big Day Out today lost its right to stop ticket scalping on electronic auction sites. Today’s court case was in response to a lawsuit taken by eBay alleging the organisers were in breach of federal law by changing fine print on tickets from ‘may be voidable’ to ‘will be voidable’ when resold. The change would have meant that if a ticket was found to be sold or scalped then the promoters would have been allowed to cancel it, but today’s legal results will prevent the Big Day Out from taking any such action.

Ken West, director, producer and all round BDO head honcho, was naturally far from happy with the result. “The court case lodged by eBay attacked the process and not the objective and in taking the moral high ground has exposed that good intentions count for nothing once you are in a court of law,” West said in a statement.

“We sincerely apologise that we have let our supporters down. The decision today means that for this year, we are not able to stop, or even slow, the parasitic process of ticket scalping,” he says. “The irony is that the consumer is the person who attends the show, not the ticket"