Firstly touting itself as a whole isn't illegal, I wasn't refering specifically to Glastonbury.
Also touts will ALWAYS find a way around the system, everyone thought that putting pictures on the tickets would stop it dead, clearly it hasn't.
It really has though to be honest which is why a lot of the hysteria in this thread is going way over the top. Yes we're still getting the occasional few ebay auctions and maybe even some people buying a couple of extra tickets to sell on at a profit which though wrong is nowhere near the level of years gone by.
As i've said before the system has worked because there's no way on earth that professional touting operations would touch Glasto tickets with a bargepole as there're now too many obstacles in the way of them making a quick and guaranteed return on their investment.
It's unfortunate that some people still feel the need to profit at the expense of others but the amount of people trying it these days as opposed to a few years ago is such a small percentage that it renders it insignificant. Yes there's a morality problem involved but seriously, for such a tiny proportion of tickets it’s just not worth getting excited about.
As I’ve said many times before I have a problem when genuine festival goers are held to ransom by touts buying up supply and holding them to ransom. This simply won’t happen anymore as no sane business man would take the risk anymore.
To be honest I don’t know of anybody who genuinely wanted to go this year who wasn’t able to get a ticket through genuine channels at face value. There was more than ample opportunity in the three sales and the last resale was stupidly easy to get on the booking page. I’m not saying people who didn’t get tickets deserve to be held to ransom simply that if they’d made the effort they had more than enough opportunity to get tickets.
Point is that if there was a genuine problem with touts there would be many more stories of people unable to get tickets through the genuine channels on here which as far as I can see just haven’t materialised.
Even if for some bizarre reason some company did decide to buy up thousands of tickets word would soon get out about the amount on ebay and security would be massively shithot on the site. So as I’ve said before it would sort itself out as the moment is became apparent that large numbers of tickets were being sold on you would hear of large numbers being turned away from the site. Word would get round and the following year second hand tickets would be worthless to touts.
This is why although there will always be the odd one or two people trying it on it will never become more than that. It’s the thin end of a very thin wedge because it would never get beyond a very small minority unless these supposed rampant capitalists really had no understanding of the concept of capitalism.
Edited by farewellandgoodnight, 11 June 2010 - 01:11 PM.
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