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Tuesday, March 21, 2006 |
The Ticking Clock Behind Ticketmaster's Sneakwrap Agreement
Sneakwrap -- the tons of legalese website visitors so often have to agree to without reading -- just got worse, as Ticketmaster has decided to make it into a time trial:
"I just had the wonderful experience of purchasing tickets through Ticketmaster," a reader wrote. "I won't get into my gripe about how they have a stranglehold on basically all the music/entertainment/sporting event ticket sales. I'm particularly annoyed by their order processing and privacy policies. Their online ordering system has time limits for each screen where you select tickets, shipping, and enter in your information ranging from one to three minutes. They say the point of these time limits is to ensure nobody holds up a particular ticket for too long, but they prevent you from fully reading and understanding the information presented to you."Infoworld's Ed Foster, who has made sneakwrap contracts his bête noir, has been chasing down particularly egregious contracts like these for years. Ticketmaster's includes a clause that says your privacy doesn't matter one whit to them, as "it still has all that stuff about Ticketmaster sharing all your information with their event partners, and the event partners in turn being able to do whatever they want with it including selling it to others." Worse, there's no way out:
"It's an opt-out policy with no way to opt-out," marveled the reader. "Only by reading their privacy policy -- where they 'demonstrate our firm commitment to protecting information you submit' -- do you learn that you have to go to the My Account section of the site to change your preferences. On that page, they note that 'Regardless of your selections above, if you purchase a ticket, or if you complete a registration form in order to be able to purchase a ticket to an event or to receive a ticketAlert, then parties associated with that event or Alert may still be provided with your information and may still contact you.' What are we supposed to do? It's not like we can avoid Ticketmaster!"Whether such terms are enforceable or not remains to be seen (the courts have varied on their decisions), but Foster's analysis noted the "agreement" had over 3,800 words that a customer was expected to read and comprehend in that three minutes. I can only surmise that a rational judicial system will void such abuse in the future, but we can't assured that common sense will win the day in the courts.
Comments:
At least in California, there are statutes that arguably prohibit the Ticketmaster policy, when coupled with the time-limit thing. It could be considered an unfair business practice under Cal. Business & Professions Code section 17200.
# posted by 
: 3/21/2006 12:04:00 PM
: 3/21/2006 12:04:00 PM
Maybe after the baseball season when we all have some more time, we can start the class action suit. Who wants to cash in on some easy legal fees?
That's why I try to use Stub Hub first. Sometimes, they can be more pricey, sometimes not, but I've never had a problem with them, and there are always tickets available.
# posted by : 3/21/2006 02:00:00 PM
: 3/21/2006 02:00:00 PM
In the comments thread to the article, one suggestion is that this might be an ADA lawsuit waiting to happen for people with vision disabilities.
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