Having “exhausted” all of its appeals, StubHub this month has begun updating the customer information it is providing the New England Patriots in the legal battle the two have waged for two years.
StubHub President Chris Tsakalakis, in a recent email to ticket brokers, customers and others, explains that the company is being ordered by the court to update the records.
“As you may know, in November of 2006, the New England Patriots filed a lawsuit against StubHub over our right to provide a marketplace for the resale of Patriots tickets. As part of the lawsuit, the Massachusetts Superior Court ordered StubHub to surrender the contact information of StubHub customers who bought, bid on, listed or sold tickets to a Patriots home game from November 2002 to January 2007,” Tsakalakis wrote.
“After exhausting our appeals, we were required to comply with the court’s order. Despite our continued efforts to fight turning this information over to the Patriots, the court recently ordered StubHub to surrender that same information (contact information of StubHub customers who bought, bid on, listed or sold tickets to a Patriots home game) from January 24, 2007 going forward. In light of this recent ruling, you have been identified as a customer whose contact information, listing and/or transactional information, must be provided to the Patriots.”
Last fall, StubHub began turning over more than 13,000 names to the Patriots, and StubHub spokesperson Sean Pate told TicketNews that, “Since January 27, 2007 (the last date through which information was previously produced to the Patriots) StubHub has had 10,452 new users engaged in listing, selling, bidding on and buying Patriots home game tickets” on the site.
The Patriots sued StubHub because the team prohibits the resale of its tickets, even though tickets to Patriots games can be found among brokers and fans all over the web. The information being provided is part of the “discovery” phase of the case, but Pate said, “The Court, however, has made no ruling on the relevance or admissibility of such information. StubHub is complying with the Court’s order while it maintains that the information produced to the Patriots will not be relevant to their claims in the case.”
Pate said the recent court decision will not stop StubHub from trying to protect customer data in the future. “StubHub will continue to fight to protect the information of our customers whenever possible.”
Nor has the lawsuit curtailed sales activity for Patriots tickets. “Sales activity for Patriots tickets has strengthened over the course of the last season. In the five years leading up to last fall (when the Court initially ruled that StubHub must produce customer contact information and transactional data), the amount of users engaged in listing, selling, bidding on, and buying, Patriots home game tickets had steadily increased to 13,000. Since then (a little less than a year and a half) StubHub has had 10,452 new users engaged in listing, selling, bidding on, and buying, Patriots home game tickets,” Pate said.
