Photo Credit: David Veksler
A jury has officially cleared Live Nation and Ticketmaster of liability in an over $120 million patent infringement suit.
The jurors just recently handed down the verdict, finding that Ticketmaster as well as its Live Nation parent hadn’t infringed upon a patent (number 8,849,720) that plaintiff Global eTicket Exchange had applied for in 2011 and then received in 2014. Founded in 1999, per its LinkedIn profile, Wexford, Pennsylvania-headquartered Global bills itself as “an innovative, strategic consulting and licensing company formed to serve” the multibillion-dollar ticketing space.
Meanwhile, the mentioned patent, “Entertainment Event Ticket Purchase and Exchange System,” refers (in part) to “an electronic ticket exchange system” featuring “a market-making system by which patrons submit bids over a limited time period for seats of different quality.”
Also included within the patent is a description of “a trading system via which the electronic ticket for the entertainment event that was purchased by the first patron, and represented by the token stored in said database, can be transferred” to another customer.
In its more than 40-page-long original complaint, filed in a Texas federal court back in April of 2021, Global maintained that both Live Nation and Ticketmaster had infringed upon said patent (and another yet, number 10,217,065) in the course of their normal operations, including through TM+.
But as initially highlighted, it took a jury less than two hours yesterday to clear Live Nation and Ticketmaster of liability on all counts, court documents show.
After naming the foreperson at 11:15 AM local time, the jury at 1:03 PM returned a verdict form in Live Nation’s favor, indicating that the Beverly Hills-based promoter – which posted seemingly strong Q1 earnings yesterday – hadn’t infringed upon the ‘720 patent with SafeTix, TM+, or otherwise.
At the time of this writing, Live Nation (whose CEO reportedly pulled down a cool $139 million last year) didn’t appear to have addressed the legal victory via a formal release. Additionally, neither Global eTicket Exchange itself (which has only posted to its newsroom a handful of times since 2019) nor the company’s founders looked to have responded publicly to the development.
In any event, Live Nation (which three weeks ago beat a case concerning an all-female country festival concept) and Ticketmaster are still grappling with other actions and regulatory scrutiny from both sides of the aisle. Late March brought a class-action lawsuit against the ticketing platform in Canada, where the plaintiffs allege that they were forced to pay “artificially inflated” sums for Drake passes.