A few months ago I wrote about how the Patriots sued StubHub. About a month later, StubHub sued the Patriots right back. They claimed that the Patriots are engaged in monopolistic business practices and are attempting to restrain trade through unfair trade practices.
The Patriots attorney, Daniel Goldberg, claims that the suit is ridiculous. He claims that the Patriots can not be engaged in a monopolistic practice because it seeks to keep the prices of tickets near face value, and the point of the antiscalping law that the Patriots originally sued over was an attempt to fight rising ticket prices.
On the one hand, I do not like that the Patriots are trying to control the tickets. I think that somebody should be able to sell their season ticket if they can not attend a specific game. However, they do have their own ticket exchange system. I am not sure exactly how that works and whether the system is flawed or not, but StubHub and eBay are both much more popular places to purchase tickets than the Patriots own exchange.
I have avoided them, however, due to the stories of cancelled tickets and bad seats on the ones that do let you in the gate. I suppose we will see how this plays out. StubHub has a partnership with USC, the Redskins, and the Chargers; does anybody from those areas have any comments on how their system works?
(Sources: Boston.com [Dec 20th] – Boston.com [Dec 21st] – Thanks to Jeremy Bayard for the heads up!)
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