eBay Bans Sales of Obama Tickets
Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: ebay, obama, inaguration, tickets | Themes: The Internet
Some people are willing to pay anything for a front-row seat to the upcoming inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, but they won’t be able to buy the tickets on eBay anymore. At the urging of Senator Dianne Feinstein and the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, the world’s most popular online auction house has pulled all existing sales of the tickets. In some cases, the sellers were asking upwards of $40,000 per ticket.
The funny thing is, the 240,000 “front-row” tickets are free and will be distributed the week before the inauguration by Congressional Representatives and Senators. Other seats nearby and along the parade route are selling for approximately $25 and up. Obama will be inaugurated on January 20th, 2009, and the National Park Service estimates that more than one million people will attend the inauguration.
To prevent further sales, Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation yesterday that would make scalping inauguration tickets a misdemeanor punishable by a fine and up to one year imprisonment. The bill is expected to pass.
Scalpers taking advantage of free tickets is a common occurrence and some readers may remember last year’s free Bon Jovi concert in Central Park New York. 60,000 free tickets were handed out for that concert, but some of them ended up on Craigslist and eBay for as much as $1500 each.
This time Craigslist is being used for a different reason. Many of the Washington DC-area hotels are sold out and nearby homeowners are offering up their houses and rooms for up to $20,000 for the week. In one Craigslist ad, one person was renting out his apartment rooms for a princely sum of $1700 per night.
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It's pretty sad the MAJOR gouging these people are doing when offering their homes/rooms for rent. Nothing legally wrong with it, but morally it's deplorable.
People are always waiting to get scammed...that's what freedom in this country has turned into...but of coarse a law to fix a moral issue? Indeed a sad state to be in.
Why exactly is it bad to scalp an inauguration ticket? So somebody else wants to go that badly and doesn't have a ticket, why does the government care? I really don't get it.
No, scalping is a legal as well as moral issue. I HATE scalpers, people have privileged access to tickets, buy them in HUGE blocks, then miraculously there are tons of scalpers on event day with TONS of good seats/tickets. THAT's why it's so hard for the actual fan to get a good seat/ticket even when they're waiting in line for hours (either on location or online) for the tickets to go on sale.
So instead of making stupid laws, the ticket sellers just need to set limits on the number of tickets one person can buy. I live in Canada and we have no anti-scalping laws, but most venues do have limits. You still get a lot of people buying 4 tickets (or whatever the limit is) and selling a couple of them on Craigslist, but you don't have one person selling 100s of tickets. This keeps the prices down and gives people that don't want to click furiously on Ticketmaster as soon as tickets are on sale a chance to see the show.
People are nuts when it comes to political things. This Sarah Palin doll sold for $19,000 on eBay: http://crazycraponebay.blogspot.co [...] -doll.html
As for having a place to stay at the inauguration, people should try couchsurfing.com.
or you could just watch it at home
wow...I'd say this is a bit of a departure for congress!
usually they just tax things that are ridiculously lucrative.