IP Transactions: Licensing, Acquisitions & Dispositions

Graham Fenton, a recent 2020 graduate of UCLA School of Law and current associate at Greenberg Glusker, published "Taming the Ticket Market: How a Closed Ticketing System Can Beat Back Scalpers and Recapture Lost Revenue" in "Entertainment & Sports Lawyer," a publication by the American Bar Association.  Excerpt:  Ticket resale for profit, or “scalping,” is seemingly as old as live entertainment itself. With the advent of computerized “ticket bots” and online secondary markets, what started as a street-corner trade has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry. In today’s music market, this is particularly unfortunate as concert revenue often comprises the vast majority of an artist’s income. Lawmakers have tried and failed to address the problem. Economists, on the other hand, question whether scalping is a problem at all, or rather an illustration of the free market at work. This paper argues that it is the artist’s, rather than the market’s right to determine the price at which tickets reach the consumer. This can eventually be accomplished through blockchain ticketing, but as the industry waits for blockchain technology to reach scalability, Congress should federally mandate a closed-ticketing system that mimics the blockchain. Part II of this paper explains the economics of the resale market. Part III looks at how lawmakers have tried and failed to curtail scalping. Part IV examines how the industry has responded with limited success. Part V proposes short-term and long-term solutions while Part VI concludes.

As the legal landscape continues to evolve in terms of intellectual property and licensing law, the Los Angeles Business Journal once again turned to some of the leading IP attorneys and experts in the region to get their assessments regarding the current state of IP legislation, the new rules of copyright protection, licensing and technology, and the various trends that they have been observing, and in some cases, driving. Here are a series of questions the Business Journal posed to these experts and the unique responses they provided – offering a glimpse into the state of intellectual property law in 2019 – from the perspectives of those in the trenches of our region today.