NEW YORK (AP) – For decades, ticket scalping was a thing done in the shadows, but those days of ducking into alleyways and dodging police are fading fast.

New York is poised this week to become the latest in a string of states to ease or eliminate decades-old restrictions on the resale of tickets to sporting events, concerts and shows.

Under the proposed rules, the state would discard its long practice of capping prices for tickets sold on the secondary market.
Some old regulations would stay in place. Scalpers would still be banned from selling tickets within 1,500 feet of large arenas like Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium. Smaller venues would get a similar 500-foot buffer zone. Brokers who sell large numbers of tickets would still need to get a license.

But the change would, for the first time, make it entirely legal for average fans to scalp their seats on the Internet.

For better or worse, it would also allow anyone holding a hot ticket to a Mets playoff game or Broadway musical to sell them off for whatever buyers were willing to pay.

“If you have something to sell, you should be able to sell it for what it is truly worth,” said Sean Pate, spokesman for the online ticket broker StubHub Inc., which lobbied hard for the change.
The state assembly voted for the bill Tuesday. The Senate is expected to follow suit, and Governor Spitzer could sign the measure by Friday, when the state’s old anti-scalping law expires.

New York is far from alone in its redrafting of scalping rules.

Minnesota tossed out its old anti-scalping laws this spring. The state previously allowed tickets to be resold only at face value.

A bill that would ease Missouri’s ban on selling tickets to sporting events at more than face value passed the legislature and is now being considered by the governor.

Illinois and Florida also recently did away with old anti-scalping rules, and bills to ease restrictions are under serious discussion in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The changes aren’t pleasing everyone.

Russ Haven, of the New York Public Interest Research Group, said lifting the price caps will only prompt greedy opportunists to snap up every available seat, and then jack up prices to artificial highs.

“I think this is a bum deal for consumers,” Mr. Haven said. “As it is, seats to popular events are often selling for 10 times their face price.”

“It may be that there will be some portion of tickets that go for less than face value, but that’s not what they’re all banking on,” he said of the brokers and ticket agencies pushing for change.

The rapid shift toward the free market now in place in a majority of states has been propelled by a variety of factors.

The explosion of Internet ticket sales has made it nearly impossible for states to enforce price caps. New York’s old rule limiting a seller’s profits to no more than 45 percent over face value has been widely ignored online.

Politicians have also warmed to arguments that easing restrictions might force profit-minded brokers to compete on price with regular fans who just want to unload seats they can’t use.

“The more tickets you have basically floating around, the more prices actually come down,” said state Senator Skelos if New York, one of the primary sponsors of the new rules in New York.

But perhaps the biggest change was a switch in business strategy by some of the sports and entertainment companies that previously fought scalping the hardest.

Realizing that a multibillion-dollar market was being left untapped, a growing number of teams and theaters have been entering the secondary ticket market themselves.

The NCAA signed a deal last year to resell tournament tickets through RazorGator.com. The NBA and some NFL teams have made Ticketmaster their official reseller under an agreement that gives teams a percentage of the profit when a seat is resold.

“There is obviously a business opportunity here for us,” said Ticketmaster vice president Joseph Freeman.

Yet to be seen is how much control sports teams, theaters and concert halls will retain over the tickets being resold.

Some have pushed for legislation that would limit reselling to venue-approved brokerages, in part to cut down on the possibility of fraud.

Both the Yankees and their archrival Red Sox recently have made a practice of cracking down on season ticket holders who are caught selling their unwanted seats on the Internet, in violation of team policy.

Lawmakers have generally frowned on both practices.

New York’s new scalping rules, if passed in their current form, would actually ban New York sports teams from taking punitive action against season ticket holders who sell their seats online.

“My feeling is, if I have a ticket, and I can’t go to a ballgame, I should certainly have a right to give it to my brother or my cousin – and if they want to pay me for it, why should I have to go through the Yankees to do it?” Mr. Skelos said.