- What is this lawsuit about? This lawsuit requests that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia grant a preliminary injunction to stop enforcement of DC’s RESALE Act, a law passed by the DC Council in 2026, and argues that the RESALE Act violates the U.S. Constitution in three distinct ways:
- It violates the dormant Commerce Clause, because it regulates commerce outside DC and because it was enacted for a protectionist purpose;
- It violates due process, because the Act’s fee cap is confiscatory, and the fee and price caps deny fair notice to the parties;
- It violates the First Amendment, because it requires ticket resellers to disclose the price of the original ticket, which they cannot do, given they were not parties to that transaction, and the original price of the ticket is not always identifiable.
- Who are the plaintiffs in this case? The plaintiffs in this case are Ticket Policy Forum, a public policy-oriented trade association that represents ticket marketplaces, and four of its members: SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, Gametime, and TickPick.
- What are the plaintiffs in this case seeking? The plaintiffs in this case are seeking a preliminary injunction that would stop enforcement of DC’s RESALE Act before it takes effect, alleging that the Act violates the U.S. Constitution.
- What are the legal problems with DC’s RESALE Act? The lawsuit alleges three significant Constitutional issues with the law, each of which, on its own, should be enough to justify the Court granting the motion for preliminary injunction:
- The law regulates sales outside D.C.: The Act sets prices for any resale of a ticket to a D.C. event, regardless of where the buyer, seller and marketplace are located. Fewer than 1% of the covered transactions last year by the companies in this lawsuit involved both a D.C. seller and buyer. As a result, the law violates the dormant Commerce Clause and the Home Rule Act, which bars the District from regulating commerce beyond its borders.
- The fee caps are arbitrary, confiscatory, and violate the Due Process Clause: Legal precedents prevent a government from setting rates so low that businesses cannot be compensated for their services or earn a reasonable return on their investment. Additionally, the caps are based on initial sale prices that the online resale marketplaces cannot confirm without data provided directly from the original seller, a fact that will raise substantial compliance challenges both with the price cap and disclosure requirement. Further, resale marketplaces do not know the original price paid, because most tickets are now digital revolving QR codes or barcodes that don’t have price information tied to them, and they don’t know if the price has changed through the use of dynamic pricing by the venue box office or its primary ticketing agent.
- The Act compels speech which marketplaces cannot verify: The original-price disclosure forces marketplaces to publish the initial price paid for a ticket in a transaction they were not part of. The suit argues this violates the First Amendment, and notes that the Council exempted primary ticket sellers from the law and never considered requiring ticket issuers, who know the price, to transmit it with the ticket.
- Does the lawsuit have an impact beyond D.C.? Yes – legislation similar to what the lawsuit is challenging here has been filed in 15 states. If this law is deemed unconstitutional, it would make clear to others considering enacting similar statutes that they cannot stand under the U.S. Constitution.
- What would the impact be if the RESALE Act was allowed to go into effect?
- It depends on how the resale marketplaces respond. If they stop selling tickets for DC events in light of the substantial compliance challenges, fans would be left with limited options to buy and sell tickets in the resale market that are fraught with fraud.
- If they stay in the DC market, then as the chaotic rollout of a similar law in Ontario, Canada, is demonstrating, consumers will suffer. The Act would cause irreparable and lasting harm. The companies involved in the suit would need to reengineer their platforms for DC, at significant cost, and it threatens the relationships between plaintiffs, their distribution partners, and customers.
- What happens to ticket prices if the law takes effect? If the Act were to go into effect, it would not result in lower-cost tickets. Since the law exempts primary ticketing companies, like the dominant illegal monopoly Ticketmaster, those companies will be free to set ticket prices however they choose, and they raise them consistently through dynamic pricing schemes. Resale ticket prices would also rise as the law pushes resales to unregulated channels, where there are higher rates of fraud and consumers face greater financial losses.
- What happens to ticket prices if the law is blocked? If the law is blocked, consumers would be able to price tickets as they choose, in line with market demand, and consumers would continue to be able to comparison shop for tickets on safe platforms that specialize in ticketing and offer important protections to consumers. As commenters informed the Council during the legislative process, an American Consumer Institute study of 80,000 live events nationwide in 2024 found that more than half of those events had tickets offered on resale marketplaces at prices lower than the venue box office, saving consumers hundreds of millions of dollars.