Winners & losers: It's a depressingly common sight to see tickets for concerts, shows, and other events getting snapped up en masse before appearing on reseller sites with huge markups. It's why Washington DC introduced a bill limiting how much resellers can raise the price of tickets, but the marketplaces are now suing the District of Columbia to block this law.
The DC council passed the Restricting Egregious Scalping Against Live Entertainment Amendment (RESALE) Act in June. Set to become law on January 1, 2027, it ensures that tickets purchased for shows can't be resold for more than 10% of the original price, including fees and taxes. It also limits the service fee that a resale marketplace can charge to 10% of that same original price. Tickets to most sporting events and movie tickets are exempt.
That sounds like a law that would be welcomed by everyone other than scalpers profiting from the tickets. But the resale sites themselves are also unhappy about it, unsurprisingly.
Four of these companies – SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, Gametime and TickPick – are so against the RESALE Act that they're suing to stop it from going into effect.
Brian Berry, Executive Director of the Ticket Policy Forum (TPF), a trade association of online ticket marketplaces, claims the law will simply drive ticket scams into shady, unregulated areas, subjecting fans to greater risks from street-side scams and increased fraud.
"The legally flawed Act would apply to sales largely outside the District and set arbitrary resale-only price caps tied to the original cost of a ticket, information companies in the secondary market do not have and cannot disclose because they were not part of these initial transactions," he said.
Berry added that the law exempts primary ticket sales, like Ticketmaster and venue box office ticketing, allowing them to raise ticket prices and undermine the stated purpose of the law, while making it harder for TPF members to compete "in a market dominated by an illegal monopoly."
"Ticketmaster backed this law; Ticketmaster pushed this law and Ticketmaster got itself exempted from this law. That's not a law that's going to serve DC well," Berry said.
The lawsuit challenges the RESALE Act's constitutionality, alleging that it breaches the US Constitution's dormant Commerce Clause, Due Process Clause, and First Amendment.
The lawsuit also alleges that the legislation violates the Home Rule Act, which limits the DC Council to passing laws that apply "exclusively in or to the District."
The complaint says fewer than 1% of transactions covered by the law on the plaintiffs' platforms last year involved buyers and sellers who were both in DC. For tickets to non-sporting events held in the District, roughly 85 – 90% of transactions involved buyers and sellers who were both located outside DC, according to the filing.
The complaint also states that the 10% cap on service fees charged by resale marketplaces often isn't enough to cover the cost of completing a transaction.
Not everyone agrees with TPF, of course. IMP Entertainment, which owns the 9:30 Club and supported the bill, told NBC Washington it hopes the limits on resellers do take effect.
"They just want to keep taking advantage of everyone," said Audrey Fix-Schaefer of IMP.
"The audacity that they think they're being picked on is kind of humorous," said DC Councilmember Charles Allen. "They have been running this scam for a long time and getting away with it, and that's gonna change."
The DC fight is the latest chapter in America's long-running battle over ticket prices. The FTC first cracked down on ticket-buying bots in 2021, before suing Ticketmaster and Live Nation in September 2025 over allegations they enabled scalpers to bypass purchase limits and misled fans about prices. That case remains pending after surviving a motion to dismiss.
Federal rules now require mandatory ticket fees to be disclosed upfront, but price transparency alone offers little comfort to fans watching tickets disappear the instant they go on sale and return with enormous markups.