AEG’s ticketing company AXS last week sued SecureMyPass, a US-based business that allows ticket touts to circumvent the transfer restrictions that are put in place by primary ticketing sites and the promoters that use them.
AXS claims that SecureMyPass breaches its terms and infringes its trademarks by cloning tickets that have been issued by AXS so that they can be accessed outside of the AXS app. That allows touts to send tickets they have sourced via AXS to their buyers without the AEG ticketing company knowing that a transfer has occurred. The cloned ticket is then designed to look like the original AXS ticket.
“Consumers, venues, artists and AXS alike are all harmed by SecureMyPass’s pernicious and fraudulent behaviour”, the lawsuit states. Consumers are harmed in various different ways, it then explains.
The cloned ticket may have incorrect seat numbers or not include extra benefits that come with the ticket, such as VIP access. Customers may become confused as to why their AXS ticket isn’t stored in their AXS app. Plus, says the AEG company, SecureMyPass can be used by out-right scammers to sell the same tickets multiple times. When that happens, only the first ticket-buyer to arrive at the venue will be let in.
So, there’s plenty of potential consumer harm. Although, in a statement responding to and criticising the lawsuit, SecureMyPass plays down those potential issues, and insists that the only real problem for ticket-buyers is when a venue tells its staff to refuse admission to people with SecureMyPass-issued tickets, even though those tickets are valid.
A spokesperson told Billboard that “tickets delivered through SecureMyPass scan correctly”, which means if concert-goers with a SecureMyPass-issued ticket are refused entry, “it is not because the ticket is invalid, but because venue staff have been instructed to visually identify and reject tickets delivered outside the AXS app”.
Until recently ticket touting was generally not as controversial in the US as it has been in the UK. However, both AXS and Live Nation’s Ticketmaster now take the position that artists and promoters should be able to control the resale of their tickets by setting resale restrictions. That might mean stopping touting entirely, or putting price caps onto the resale, or just allowing the touts to do whatever they want.
While that’s spun as a pro-artist position - and most artists do want that control - secondary ticketing platforms argue that both AXS and Ticketmaster are motivated by self-interest.
That’s because when those controls are in place tickets can only be resold within the primary ticketing platforms, and not via third party resale sites. Both AXS and Ticketmaster have resale tools within their primary platforms, use of which earns them a second commission.
SecureMyPass takes that position. It claims that any transfer restrictions put in place by AXS and Ticketmaster are “not about consumer access or fan protection”. Instead they exist to allow the big primary ticketing companies to also control the resale market. And the AXS lawsuit is simply part of that mission, according to SecureMyPass’s spokesperson.
In its legal filing with the courts in California, AXS outlines its various efforts regarding ticket security and explains how SecureMyPass seeks to circumvent those efforts, while also discussing how the tickets issued by SecureMyPass utilise and infringe the AXS trademarks. It also runs through a series of case studies of customers who have had problems because a tout issued them a ticket through SecureMyPass.
It then concludes by stating that SecureMyPass is liable for breach of contract, trademark infringement and unfair competition, all stemming from its “willful, deliberate and malicious acts that are causing substantial and irreparable harm to AXS’s goodwill, reputation and business”.
