Understanding the legality of Bots.

I have been in this market for 15 years so that isn’t as long as some others here but I have been a technologist for over 25 years. I hear many brokers saying its legal in Canada to use bots and are moving their office to Canada to be able to use bots “legally” and I wanted to clarify something.

NO USAGE OF ANY BOTS IS LEGAL. Why do you think the creators of these bots are overseas instead of in Canada? Extradition is why. Canada and the US have perfectly good Extradition treaties in place.

By using a bot, you are KNOWINGLY breaking the laws of a sovereign country the US and the ToS of TM. The people who went to Canada to try to go around the law are eventually going to be in even more trouble as they have broken more laws in doing this.

TicketMaster owns its servers. When you go to their website, you are agreeing to their Terms of Service whether you take the time to read them or not. When you go to a hotel, restaurant, rent a car or go to a venue, it’s the same thing. The minute you walk in the door or use the service, or in this case go to the website, you agreed to abide by those terms and that includes the terms regarding the use of bots.

These bots are poorly written code. They’re easily traced and found which means, TM knows who is using them, what they are doing with them and everything in between.

So, do yourself a favor. Don’t use bots. You’re not only hurting yourself but this industry as well which puts thousands of people out of work for your profit?

I will not be surprised when TM comes out with a list of offenders that they go after to the fullest extent of the laws to make examples of what happens when you violate their TOS. Do some simple research a few others have already been pursued, sued and jailed. That won’t only affect the offenders, it will likely destroy this market itself when enough public outcry demands change. Bot users will be villainized, fined, jailed along with all the legit brokers in this market and more and for what? The more that use the bots, the faster the STM will die! Don’t help Ticketmaster destroy this amazing market!

I could EASLY find all of you if I worked at TM in a matter of weeks and even if I didn’t work at TM. I could simply sign up for this bot trashware and decrypt and hack into their network and find you all than do a press release and name you, help law enforcement on both sides of the border as the bots might not be illegal but what you are doing to Ticketmaster’s servers is! If I’ve thought about how to find you, don’t you think TicketMaster has?

Some information: (it is EXTREMELY clear no drop notifiers, no bots. No programs to help you buy.. Just because you don’t understand something or know doesn’t make it legal or right)

http://www.ticketmaster.com/h/terms.html (A brief look over and cut and pasted some, not all that is relevant)

• Use any robot, spider, offline reader, site search/retrieval application or other manual or automatic device, tool, or process to retrieve, index, data mine or in any way reproduce or circumvent the navigational structure or presentation of the Content or the Site, including with respect to any CAPTCHA displayed on the Site. Operators of public search engines may use spiders to copy materials from the Site for the sole purpose of and solely to the extent necessary for creating publicly available searchable indices of the materials, but not caches or archives of such materials. We may revoke this exception at any time and require removal of archived materials gathered in the past;
• Reproduce, modify, display, publicly perform, distribute or create derivative works of the Site or the Content;
• Decode, decrypt, modify, or reverse engineer any tickets or underlying algorithms or barcodes used on or in production of tickets or the Site;
• Use the Site or the Content in an attempt to, or in conjunction with, any device, program or service designed to circumvent any technological measure that effectively controls access to, or the rights in, the Site and/or Content in any way including, without limitation, by manual or automatic device or process, for any purpose.
• MANY other parts of the ToS refer bots, drop notifiers and other like apps.

www.ticketmaster.ca  – they are in Canada and under Canadian law with their ToS you are breaking. So is livenation CA.….they are incorporated in dozens of countries and their ToS is supported by those countries.

Your day is coming bot users… Not trying to offend, but inform.

Tags: bots, illegal, ticketmaster