I just rechecked an in my country (Poland) both buying and reselling tickets "for artistic, sporting and entertainment events" (sorry, Im not really good at translating law language) at non-market prices is a fellony, I just assumed it's the same in the rest of .EU.

Might be wrong, since I remember that this was a huge thing in the 90's, so maybe our goverment took some special counter-measures.

Creating scarcity by withholding thousands of tickets until the last day before you release them at extortion prices isn't "just economics".

Maybe there’s an error in the translation, but ‘market price’ is what somebody is willing to pay for an item or service. So if you buy a ticket for $100 and a third person tells you they want to buy it for $1000, then $1000 is the market price for that item.

If you mean ‘face value’, I would still question the phrasing, because at ‘non-face value’ would also mean that you are not allowed to resell that $100 ticket for $80 because you lost interest in the event.

That link for soccer matches in England is interesting, as it involves ‘public order’ as a reason not being allowed to resell a ticket. For that same reason, reselling ‘personalized’ tickets is illegal in other European countries. So if your name is on the ticket, the host of the event can prohibit customers from giving the ticket to a third party, no matter if they have to pay for it.

k, Ill give my best to translating the whole paragraph from our code of offences (art. 133): "whoever buys tickets for an artistic, sporting or entertainment events with the intention of selling them with profit, or whoever sells such tickets with profit, is a subject of punishment of arrest, prison sentence or fine"

so, the wording is quite strange, but I think it is also pretty clear. I am honestly surprised that this isn't standard for lawmaking, as abundance of such laws gives soooo much room for very scummy behaviour

We are saying the same thing. That scarcity that you speak of is largely a product of bots.

Nobody is extorted into going to a football game. The buyers set the price.

Even those states statutes seem to have zero teeth anymore with the advent of services like StubHub, Craigslist-Tickets, Ticket Broker websites, etc., etc.

There's a good Freakanomics podcast on this issue. There are a lot of issues at play here, but saying that resellers are screwing things up for the "fans" is not one of them.

Tickets are priced artificially low for several reasons which is why there is a reseller market. The podcast talks about a lot of things. (Did you know that some insiders get blocks of seats as partial payment, which they in turn also resell?)

This. Give people a chance.

Bots ruin everything that's fun.

+1

They were trying to provide/facilitate/corner a secondary market, not partake.

One more time: They didn't participate in a secondary ticket market because there were no tickets.

More they didn't actually partake as it was a scam all along

More like they didn't solicit an underage girl because it was a 30 year old male police officer posing as an underage girl in a chatroom.