TM Back To Courting Bots

The company has filed suit against the owners of a pair of Massachusetts websites it alleges have used “automated devices to access and navigate through Ticketmaster’s website and improperly procure tickets,” according to court documents.

The suit charges Higs Tickets and Higs Cityside Tickets owners John Higgins and Patrick Higgins with breach of contract, copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and fraud, among other claims.

A large portion of the filing focuses on page requests, as the Higgins’ companies make thousands of page requests per day on Ticketsmaster.com – at times as many as “350,000 page requests in a single 24-hour period” – the suit contends, all the while concealing their identities by using various account names, email addresses, physical addresses, IP addresses and credit cards.

Those requests wreak havoc on TM’s end, interfering with the company’s website operations, increasing operating costs, cutting into advertising revenues and driving customers away by making it harder to score tickets, TM says.

Ticketmaster has been battling the use of bots circumventing CAPTCHA challenges for years, and even won an $18 million judgment and a permanent injunction against RMG Technologies, which offered software to brokers to help speed through such challenges, in 2008.

While demonstrating the actual amount of damages incurred through the use of bots in the RMG case may have proved challenging for TM, the company has since figured how to determine adequate compensation. The suit against the Higginses includes a line from Ticketmaster’s current terms of use policy, which includes a special provision for those who abuse the rules of the site:

“You agree that your abusive use of the site may cause damage and harm to us, including impaired goodwill, lost sales and increased expenses,” the provision states. “You also agree that …if you, or others acting with you, request more than 1,000 pages of the site or make more than 800 reserve requests of the site in any 24-hour period, you, and those acting with you, will be jointly and severally liable for liquidated damages in the amount of twenty-five cents ($0.25) for each page request or reserve request made during that 24-hour period which exceeds those limits.”

Should TM’s terms of use stand in court, Higs Tickets and Higs Cityside Tickets could be held liable for more than $87,000 in damages for just a single day of requests, not to mention subsequent times where the companies “often made more than 100,000 page requests on Ticketmaster’s website per day.”

Ticketmaster’s suit also seeks an injunction, compensatory damages, punitive damages, disgorgement, imposition of constructive trust and attorneys’ fees and costs.