Ticketmaster L.L.C. v. Prestige Entm't, Inc.

306 F. Supp. 3d 1164
CourtDistrict Court, C.D. California
DecidedJanuary 31, 2018
DocketCase No. 2:17–CV–07232–ODW (JCx)
StatusPublished
Cited by6 cases

This text of 306 F. Supp. 3d 1164 (Ticketmaster L.L.C. v. Prestige Entm't, Inc.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, C.D. California primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Ticketmaster L.L.C. v. Prestige Entm't, Inc., 306 F. Supp. 3d 1164 (C.D. Cal. 2018).

Opinion

OTIS D. WRIGHT, II, UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

I. INTRODUCTION

Plaintiff Ticketmaster LLC ("Ticketmaster") brings this action against Defendants Prestige Entertainment, Inc. ("Prestige"), Prestige Entertainment West, Inc. ("Prestige West"), Renaissance Ventures LLC ("Renaissance"), Nicholas Lombardi, and Steven K. Lichtman. (See generally Compl., ECF No. 1.) Ticketmaster alleges claims against Defendants for: (1) breach of contract; (2) copyright infringement in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq. ; (3) violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), 17 U.S.C. § 1201 et seq. ; (4) fraud; (5) aiding and abetting fraud; (6) inducing breach of contract; (7) intentional interference with contractual relations; (8) violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA"), 18 U.S.C. § 1030 et seq. ; (9) violation of the Computer Data Access and Fraud Act ("CDAFA"), Cal. Pen. Code § 502 et seq. ; and (10) violation of the Anti-Scalping Law, N.Y. Arts & Cult. Aff. Law § 25.01 et seq.

Defendants Prestige West, Renaissance, Lombardi, and Lichtman1 now move to dismiss the following claims: (1) copyright infringement; (2) violation of the DMCA; (3) violation of the CFAA; (4) violation of the CDAFA; (5) breach of contract; (6) fraud; and (7) the state law claims.

II. FACTUAL BACKGROUND2

Ticketmaster sells tickets for live entertainment events on behalf of its clients through its website, mobile app, and telephone call centers. (Compl. ¶ 18.) Demand often exceeds the supply of tickets available through Ticketmaster, which can result in intense competition among consumers to purchase tickets for events the moment they are available for sale. (Id. ¶ 19.) In order to make the ticket-buying process fair and equitable for its consumers, Ticketmaster employs various countermeasures. (Id. ¶ 20.) For instance, Ticketmaster limits the number of tickets that may be purchased in a single transaction and regulates the speed with which users may refresh purchase requests. (Id. ) Ticketmaster also utilizes various security measures like CAPTCHA to prevent and discourage the use of automated programs-called "bots"-that give an unfair advantage over other consumers in the ticket purchasing process. (Id. ¶ 21.)

*1170Users must agree to Ticketmaster's Terms of Use ("TOU") before they can view and use Ticketmaster's website and mobile app. (Id. ¶¶ 24-27; see also Compl., Ex. A.) The TOU grants users a "limited, conditional, no-cost, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sub-licensable license to view [Ticketmaster's] Site and its Content to purchase tickets as permitted by these Terms for non-commercial purposes only if" the user agrees not to conduct certain activities. (Compl. ¶ 30.) Those prohibited activities include:

• Modify, adapt, sub-license, translate, sell, reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any portion of the Site ...;
• 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 ...;
• Use any automated software or computer system to search for, reserve, buy or otherwise obtain tickets ...;
• Take any action that imposes or may impose (in [Ticketmaster's] sole discretion) an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure;
• Access, reload or refresh transactional event or ticketing pages, or make any other request to transactional servers, more than once during any three-second interval;
• Request more than 1,000 pages of the Site in any 24-hour period, whether alone or with a group of individuals;
• Reproduce, modify, display, publicly perform, distribute or create derivative works of the Site or the Content;
• Reproduce or scan tickets in a format or medium different from that provided by the Site;
• Decode, decrypt, modify, or reverse engineer any tickets ...;
• 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 ... the Site and/or Content ... for any purpose.

(Id. ) The TOU further states that non-compliance with the TOU "constitutes unauthorized reproduction, display, or creation of unauthorized derivative versions of the Site and Content, and infringes [Ticketmaster's] copyright, trademarks, patents and other rights in the Site and Content." (Id. ¶ 31.) Ticketmaster has registered copyrights in various aspects of its website and pending applications for copyrights in its mobile apps. (See id. ¶ 28.) Users are also required to agree to a "Code of Conduct" in the TOU and abide by purchasing limits. (Id. ¶¶ 35, 37.)

For the past two years, Defendants have been using bots and dummy accounts to navigate Ticketmaster's website and mobile app to purchase large quantities of tickets. (Id. ¶¶ 40-42.) Defendants used colocation facilities with high speed bandwidth, random number and letter generators, and other evasive methods in order to avoid detection by Ticketmaster. (Id. ¶¶ 43-44, 48, 51-54.) Through the use of bots, Defendants are able to purchase and reserve large amounts of tickets in a manner impossible for a human consumer to match. (Id. ¶¶ 45, 46.) Defendants would then reproduce and resell the tickets on third-party platforms, such as StubHub.com, for profit. (Id. ¶¶ 47, 49.) Ticketmaster *1171

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Bluebook (online)
306 F. Supp. 3d 1164, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/ticketmaster-llc-v-prestige-entmt-inc-cacd-2018.