Scalped

Well the Patriots are at it again with the meddling into other people's private affairs. It turns out the Pats lawyers have won an injunction against stubhub.com requiring stub hub to turn over all the names of people selling Pats home game tickets on their web sites. The claim by New England is their policy against scalping tickets is clearly stated on the back of their tickets and that if fans don't want to go to the games they have a whole waiting list of people who would abide by the rules.

At the center of this however is the privacy of the 13,000 fans whose privacy has been compromised by this injunction. These are people who simply went to a website offered tickets for auction to the highest bidder not realizing that at some point they would be outed by the Patriots.

As a fan I'm not sure how I feel about this, if it were my team I'd probably be all for these profiteering fans being reprimanded and stripped of their tickets but at the same time all 32 teams are available on this web site. No other team seems to have a problem with this and really who doesn't want to make a buck every now and then. It's not realistic for the same person to go to all 8 home games plus pre-season every year so why not make a few bucks. The civil liberties people are all over this of course and are citing the fact the Patriots were already fined for spying on a competing team earlier this year and are now attempting to invade the privacy of their ticket holders. It should be interesting to see how all this works out, after all according to the law suit the Patriots have the right to prosecute these people for scalping so there could be a lot of time served in the New England area in the near future. This case to me is another example of an organization over stepping it's bounds and meddling in affairs they have no business in so for this week the New England Patriots are my stiff of the week!!