Comment by noodlesUK

I have to presume that the driving impetus of all of this is that they're trying to avoid the actual requirement of checking the ID. Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions.

But I mean, obviously, any kind of system like this strikes me as the same sort of thing as DRM. That you can somehow protect the message from the person you're sharing the message to. How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser? It just seemes ridiculous on its face.

Yeah I agree, they are not incentivized to fix scaling/bots because they get a fee every time a ticket is sold. It is in their best interest for the ticket to be sold as many times as possible.

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Airlines are preventing a secondary market. Unfavorable for your use case, but also prevents scalping airline tickets (while allowing airlines to attempt to maximize revenue). There are always tradeoffs and compromise.

To hack around this, I've used Southwest Airlines; I can buy tickets for folks and if they can't travel, we cancel the ticket(s) and keep the travel funds banked for another time. I hope this is potentially helpful information.

https://simpleflying.com/why-airlines-dont-allow-name-change...

Even allowing that but requiring your valid ID must be taken into the venue by yourself (or by your friends eg if you get sick and can't go) would be a big improvement, meaning ticket scalps would have to actually go or have someone on their team go along with every ticket they resell.

Depends a lot on the country you live in. In most European countries "carrying an ID" is legally required if the police stops you anyway (they do need a reason to see it though), so "show an ID at the entrance" is no big deal.

It's to my understanding mainly the US where ID requirements are often side eyed because many people don't have them and there's no national standard (and due to a variety of political reasons there probably won't ever be any.)

that's really just an opinion. and I'd argue that if people really care about a fair and sustainable concert going, given how ridiculous the live event situation is, you'd support pretty common and standard requirements like ID to be shown. as others said: ID is already required to validate age in many events/venues

> Flying requires an ID. Attending a concert should not.

Why though? Not disagreeing per say because I'd have thought so too, but upon reflection...

I assume the main reason airlines require an ID is safety and security. We maintain a denied parties list and use identity verification to make it as difficult as possible to fly a plane into a crowded venue. Border control is another issue, but there's plenty of intra-country or intra-state flights where this isn't an issue.

Ticketmaster sells unverified access to crowded venues.

How are you getting into shows without presenting ID for age? Every (well, every legal...) venue I've been to in NYC cards to see if you are 21.

I’d rather not solve it than let the state have more information about my transactions

Because this, and more very strange rules it is very hard for ticketing systems to get into the Italian market. Some examples:

- not allowed to change to time or name of the event after the 1st ticket is sold

- only allowed section names in halls from a know list

- free tickets on events... can only do this under strange conditions

- smart card application, for encryption, must run on a physical server in Italy. You should not be able to log into the ticketing box office if that smart card application is not running.

One ID for the entire order would be fine. You can buy 4 tickets, and go into the concert with your 3 friends. It often works this way even with no ID involved, I buy two tickets, add them both to my wallet, scan them both when my GF and I go to the show.

You COULD still scalp tickets if the person who bought them from you is going to walk in with you. But the scalper would have to eat the cost of one ticket to do it, and it's probably onerous enough to severly reduce the impact of scalping.

Would be awesome if it were true for airplane tickets

> Which is going to be a problem if tickets need to be transferred in contexts where users don't have internet access (but they do have local connectivity between devices) or in contexts where the venue doesn't have internet access.

You know as well as I do that TicketMaster won't allow any of that, because it means they miss out on selling another ticket.

I was recently at a Festival that requires ticket + ID (https://www.resurrectionfest.es). The key to success was to put a little more personal at the gates, maybe 15 people instead of 10. But it is also true that we have the ID document issued in our early teens it not before. Each ticket verification takes 3 more seconds extra to verify the ID matches, no big deal.

Said festival does their own ticket re-sale to avoid scalping but mainly to avoid shady sites that are known to allow the selling of counterfeits. You can only cede your ticket, not sell it. It is not perfect (e.g. if you don't find a buyer for the same price, you can't sell it at a lost to recoup some money. You get your ticket back) but at least is not as bad as the one from Ticketmaster.

how is this not the same as 8 people trying to find airline tickets for everyone? you can buy tickets for different passengers. some airlines/travel agencies even allow for name change for a fee.

This is trivial and solutions exist in the wild already. If you buy tix for the Paris Olympics, you can transfer them to your friends or you can assign their names to the tickets directly.

The interesting mechanism there is that you can buy a lot of seats at once, but you don’t get to choose where they are exactly, only the section. So in every case you’re going to have people buying big lots of tickets and distributing them to friends and family after the fact.

Or just scan your face with the new Digital ID rolling out. It's actually quite nice.

I flew about 3 days ago and they only asked for my minor children’s boarding passes.

Today's digital entry experience is far from frictionless. Might as well add a scan of the PDF417 barcode on the back of the latest state ID cards.

I just went to a MLB game yesterday, and the digital process was:

    - Open ticket app
    - scan ticket 1
    - scan ticket 2

I imagine this could have been:

    - Open ticket app
    - scan PDF417
    - scan ticket 1
    - scan ticket 2

I keep reading about this argument but Olympics and World Cup matches are arguably as large events (if not larger) and they place name on ticket and check ID at entrance.

people complain at ticketmaster yet seem to bend over backwards to justify the state of affairs

If the government needs people to have IDs, then maybe the government should provide those IDs for free...

Exactly. The privacy characteristics of government ID cards are worse than any other solution. When sharing such an ID, a person is providing several global, stable identifiers (e.g. ID number, full legal name). For adtech and data brokers, this is the ultimate fingerprint for tracking and matching.

In a perfect world, the digitization of these IDs would come with modern digital privacy and security. Scanning your ID number would only provide a recipient-specific ID that couldn't be matched with other vendors. Age eligibility and driver's licensing status would be presented as separate signed attestations that share no other data.

We aren't even heading in that direction yet.

...yet you have a phone (for the moving barcode and whatnot) which is heavier and bulkier than a card?

How often has this been a problem though? How about not keeping your boarding pass, or ticket, or credit card for that matter, visible for the world? Just put it in your wallet, I don't know.

This is security FUD. Stop solving problems that do not exist to the point where it makes the news when they do happen, once a century.

This DRM scheme concretely creates millions of small annoyances to millions of people and wasting our time as a society.

Where has rules prohibiting it? Maybe will move. :D

Oh cool, so when I buy a scalped ticket I'll simply order a quality fake ID as well.

Buying and using a scalped ticket isn't a crime for the concert-goer, using a fake ID (in most states) is meaning it puts significantly more pressure the consumer to not buy. Also, most people in the US over the age of 21 don't have fake ID's, so it's a reasonable detriment.

GenAI?

The solution doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good. Good enough is good enough.