Patriots win bid to ID fans who used ticket resale site

The New England Patriots have won a bid to get the names of all the fans who bought or sold -- or tried to buy or sell -- tickets to home games through online ticket reseller StubHub Inc., a move one technology group sees as an invasion of privacy.

A lawsuit filed last year against San Francisco-based StubHub claimed it encouraged fans to break state law and violate team policies. The team said it could seek to revoke season tickets of people who used StubHub.

Daniel Goldberg, an attorney for the Patriots, declined to say what the National Football League team planned to do with the 13,000 names, which StubHub released last week after losing its appeal of a Massachusetts state court ruling.

The team’s rules bar reselling game tickets for a profit. State law, though rarely enforced, restricts ticket markups to $2 above face value plus some service charges.

Patriots tickets have been offered on StubHub at prices many times higher, including two 50-yard line seats for New England’s Dec. 16 game against AFC rival New York Jets listed Thursday for $1,300.05 each. Their face value is $125.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based advocacy group, said the court order to turn over the names infringes on the privacy rights of Patriots fans.

“The Patriots, just at the beginning of the season, were filming opposing teams and accused of surveillance, and given a slap from the National Football League about that. Now they’re turning the cameras on their fans, so clearly there is a lack of understanding about what privacy is,” said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the center.

StubHub parent EBay Inc. is a member of the center’s working group on free speech online.

StubHub argued that the Patriots’ request violated its confidentiality agreement with its customers and said the team wanted to create a monopoly on the resale market for its own tickets.

“It is plain that the Patriots seek this highly confidential customer information to further their unlawful, anti-competitive campaign against StubHub and its customers,” StubHub said in court documents.

The Patriots argued that the team was entitled to know who might be violating its rules and the state’s anti-scalping law. The team said it was trying to ensure that fans could obtain tickets at reasonable prices, not the sometimes exorbitant prices offered through ticket agents.

“One of our claims against StubHub is that knowing we have rules against resale on the Internet, they are out there soliciting people to violate our rules,” Goldberg said. “In order to pursue that claim, we need to understand who has been persuaded by that inducement to list their tickets” on StubHub.

Goldberg said the Patriots’ rules on resale were clear and printed on the back of every ticket. “We have hundreds of people on waiting lists willing to comply with our rules, so if individuals prefer not to comply with the rules, that’s their choice,” he said.

In his order, Superior Court Judge Allan van Gestel said the Patriots had “legitimate interests” in knowing the identity of people who resell tickets through StubHub.

The judge said the Patriots could use the information for purposes beyond the lawsuit, including canceling violators’ season tickets or reporting violators to authorities.

The Patriots have revoked tickets of fans who resell on any site except the Patriots’ own TeamExchange website, which limits sales to face value. That website is run by Ticketmaster.

“I think there are probably a lot of good, loyal fans who for whatever reason can’t make it to a game and obviously don’t want to eat the ticket,” said Tony Troilo, a season ticket holder from Mansfield, Mass.

A Suffolk Superior Court judge last summer granted the Patriots’ request to force StubHub to turn over the names of 13,000 people who had used StubHub, one of the country’s largest ticket resellers.

StubHub appealed, but the ruling was upheld by the state Appeals Court. StubHub turned over the names last week, Patriots attorney Goldberg said.