Proposed bill to protect fans from scalper bots
By Natalie Rocha
Ottawa-Centre MPP and provincial Attorney General Yasir Naqvi wants to crack down on scalper bots that scoop up tickets for concerts and other events, and then resell them for prices above face value on third-party websites.
The Ontario government introduced new legislation on Feb. 28 to regulate the buying and selling of tickets online.
The Ticket Speculation Amendment Act (Purchase and Sale Requirements), known as Bill 22, prohibits computer software that bypasses security measures intended to limit bulk purchases on ticket-selling websites.
The proposed legislation builds on an existing private member’s bill to ban scalper bots, tabled last year by Kingston and the Islands MPP Sophie Kiwala.
“Scalping has been a problem for a long, long time, and people have been frustrated about it for a long time,” said Kiwala. “Access to cultural services is something that people feel very strongly about.”
Scalper bots can access a purchasing system up to 200,000 times per second, “so a human being doesn’t stand a chance in that case to have access to what they should have access to,” according to Kiwala.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the secondary ticket market is an $8-billion annual business.
The National Arts Centre has stayed one step ahead of scalper bots by selling many tickets through subscriptions in advance of the season, according to the Elgin Street performance venue’s spokesperson Carl Martin.
“As a government, we need to make sure that there is a fair shot for fans to be able to buy tickets, and a mechanism in place that shows that fans are put first,” Naqvi said. “That’s why we’ve launched a survey at ontario.ca/tickets, to ask Ontarians to give us their practical solutions as to how we can make sure that we have a system that really puts fans first in Ontario.”
“I think in the first 24 hours we had more than 20,000 people responding to it,” Kiwala said.
The bill has passed second reading in the Ontario legislature, and has been referred to a standing committee.
“The new legislation will come forward in the spring. That’s our hope,” Kiwala said.
Bradley Talgoy, a nursing student at the University of Ottawa, is no stranger to getting ripped off by scalper bots.
“I wanted to attend an international videogame competition that was coming to Canada for the first time,” Talgoy said. “Tickets sold out immediately, and within five minutes the majority of them were available at a 400- to 500-per-cent markup.”
“Many events are already quite expensive, and people should not have to pay even more just because a machine or person wants to make money off of someone else’s work,” he said.
“The less discouraged people are by shady practices, like people buying tickets and charging triple or quadruple the price of the ticket value, the more they are able to get out to see (live shows),” said Ottawa-based singer-songwriter John Carroll. “I think, for myself or any other artist, live music is our bread and butter.”
Naqvi launched an online consultation asking music lovers, sports fans and theatregoers for their input on how to solve issues of accessibility, affordability, transparency and enforcement.