Ticketmaster Sues O.C.-based Tickets.com

Events ticketing giant Ticketmaster Corp. has sued Newport Beach-based Tickets.com Inc., accusing the Internet firm of providing false and misleading information and illegally linking into Ticketmaster’s Web pages.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court last month, said Tickets.com misled Web surfers by providing incorrect telephone numbers for Ticketmaster that instead rang up brokers who would then try to sell marked-up tickets.

Ticketmaster also accused Tickets.com of falsely telling customers that some tickets were not for sale online and had to be bought from a broker, when entertainment venues still had tickets available through Ticketmaster.

Tickets.com “makes every effort to make sure that all of the information we have is accurate,” said Thomas Gimple, the company’s president and chief executive. “What we’re trying to accomplish is provide a customer service, and it is not intuitive that we would do anything to hurt that experience.”

Ticketmaster also accused Tickets.com of “deep-linking” into Ticketmaster’s site, a common practice on the Web that corporations have been challenging with increasing frequency.

Deep-linking is when one Web site connects to another, but instead of directing people to the front page of that site, it connects to a page several layers deep, bypassing advertising and taking away revenue opportunities.

Proponents of deep-linking say the practice is inherent to the Web and that because the information is on the Internet, it is in the public domain.

Last year, Ticketmaster sued Microsoft Corp. over deep-linking, but the case was settled in February, with Microsoft agreeing to stop the practice.

The lawsuit could hinder Tickets.com’s plans to raise funds through an initial public stock offering. In regulatory documents filed in June, the company said it hoped to raise about $75 million through a stock offering.

Gimple expressed optimism about the IPO, however. “There have certainly been examples of lawsuits being filed against companies who are in the same process that we are in where it hasn’t affected the initial public offering,” he said.