Concert goers suing Ticketmaster and Live Nation for ticket fees for live events believe that no one really reads the terms of service that force them to arbitrate and are asking a California federal judge for a discovery that can help them prove that website formats are to blame.
Olivia Van Iderstine and Mitch Oberstein sued Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation in April, alleging that the companies have a monopoly on live events and therefore may charge “extraordinarily high fees” for tickets.
The companies responded in June with a motion to compel arbitration. They argue that to purchase tickets through their sites, users must affirmatively accept their terms of service at least three times, and those terms include a mandatory arbitration provision and a waiver of collective action rights.
Now, the plaintiffs are asking the court to allow them to make discoveries to determine if there is a valid arbitration agreement, so they are prepared to oppose the motion to compel. They believe that the website and mobile app are formatted in such a way that users who click to continue their purchases are not really equivalent to accepting the terms.
“As they have in other cases, Defendants argue that Plaintiffs accepted arbitration clauses that are buried in the Terms of Use at www.ticketmaster.com, www.livenation.com and the Ticketmaster mobile app,” writes attorney Frederick Lorig. “The Terms of Use are presented to users in a” browse “format that does not affirmatively require consumers to read the Terms or indicate that they have read them before making a purchase.”
Plaintiffs want Live Nation and Ticketmaster to submit the total number of times users logged in to ticketmaster.com and the Ticketmaster mobile app from January 1, 2010 to the present and the number of times users clicked to view the terms of use on the site and in the application for the same period of time. They also want interrogations on the issues and statements by defense witnesses who provided statements in support of the motion to compel.
“The plaintiffs intend to show in opposition that ticketmaster.com and livenation.com are designed to actively discourage consumers from knowing or understanding that the Terms of Use is something they can or should read,” Lorig writes. “If it turns out that, as the Claimants suspect, the vast majority of users do not see the Terms of Use, that will tend to show that the website and the application provide insufficient notification of the Terms of Use, and therefore the arbitration agreement contained therein. “
Read the full motion at THR.com.
