[News from the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Speaker DiMasi, posted by David Guarino, the Speaker’s communications director …]
The House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed legislation designed to simplify existing laws on the resale of sports, concert and other event tickets while giving broad new protections to consumers victimized by counterfeiters and frauds.
The legislation requires professional ticket agencies and sellers to register with the Executive Office of Public Safety and to wear identification prominently when selling tickets.
The sellers must pay a $1,000 fee, post a $100,000 bond and provide receipts at the time of sale that identify the seller. Sellers are required to grant refunds of the ticket sold is counterfeit or in any way does not grant admission to the event, if the event is cancelled or is not as advertised.
The bill allows resellers to set prices on the open market and allows the resale of tickets on the Internet sites.
In addition, this legislation would give venues the option to establish a ticket resale area within the property line of the venue. If established, any person wishing to resell tickets would be required to operate only within the designated area. The resale area would create a space for consumers to purchase tickets and thereby prevent sales from elsewhere around their property by creating a no-sale zone of 2,500 square feet around large facilities and of 1,000 square feet around smaller facilities.
“This legislation goes a long way to ensure that consumer protections are in place for citizens who choose to purchases tickets from re-sellers. Consumer safeguards were missing from the original ticket re-sale legislation. Our revisions should ensure fans, who buy tickets from the secondary market, that the tickets they have paid for are authentic,” said Rep. Michael Rodrigues, chairman of the committee on Consumer Protection & Professional Licensure.
“Our goal here is to modernize this outdated law, to allow people the option of reselling extra tickets without fear of prosecution and to enhance consumer protections against fraudulent tickets,” said House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi.
The legislation passed in the House modifies a law originally enacted in 1924. The current law, now only sporadically enforced, does not address the licensing of ticket sellers, but generally states that no person may sell a ticket for over two dollars of the ticket’s face value.
The legislation now moves to the Senate for its consideration.
I hope this is the first of many posts by you (and I assume the Speaker)
Expect to hear more from me and the Speaker going forward. Blogs like BMG are a great way to get right to the people who care most about this great Commonwealth. We in the House are doing more every day to open up the legislative process – check out our live webcast of House sessions and new archived hearings on demand at http://www.mass.gov/legis.