A federal judge has refused to throw out the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The order, issued on 28 September 2026, proves nothing yet, but it settles two points every organiser should care about: a ticketing platform can itself face liability under the BOTS Act, and a checkout that says "+Fees" may not be telling buyers enough.
If you set a purchase limit on your tickets, or rely on a platform to show buyers an honest price, this case is now about the rules you work under, not just about one very large ticketing company.
What did the judge actually decide?
US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong denied Live Nation and Ticketmaster's motion to dismiss every claim, so the FTC and seven states can carry on with allegations under the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, the FTC Act and state consumer protection law. TicketNews read the 27-page order in full, and TheTicketingBusiness and Billboard reported the same outcome.
The central line is short: the judge wrote that the BOTS Act "does not preclude platforms from facing liability". Ticketmaster had argued the 2016 law exists to protect platforms from brokers, not to put platforms in the dock.
It matters what this ruling is not. At the motion to dismiss stage, a court assumes the complaint's allegations are true and asks only whether they are legally sufficient to proceed. The judge said plainly that she was not deciding whether the accusations are true. Ticketmaster disputes them, told Billboard it remains a leader in fighting bots, and said it expects the case to fail. The next step is a scheduling conference, not a verdict.
What is the FTC actually alleging?
The FTC has used the BOTS Act against brokers before, but this suit, filed in September 2025, points at the platform. The complaint alleges that Ticketmaster told artists and fans it enforced ticket limits while knowingly letting some professional brokers run large numbers of accounts to get around them, and that the tickets then earned a second round of fees on Ticketmaster's resale marketplace.
Ticketmaster made three main arguments for dismissal. Going over a purchase limit is not "circumvention". Ticketmaster does not sell resale tickets, it only hosts the people who do. And the complaint never ties a specific resale ticket to a specific violation. The judge rejected all three at this stage. She read "circumvention" in its ordinary sense, which includes simply evading a restriction, and noted the complaint's description of resale on Ticketmaster: the original ticket is voided and a new one is issued to the buyer, which she found went beyond a passive noticeboard.
The complaint also names a system called TicketCounter that can supposedly analyse activity across accounts and spot attempts to dodge limits. The allegation is that the tools existed and were scaled back. Again, that is the FTC's claim, not a finding.
Why does the "+Fees" part matter so much?
The fee display claim survived too, and this is the bit that travels well beyond Ticketmaster. The FTC says prices were shown without mandatory fees for much of the shopping process, with fees in some cases adding as much as 44% to the final cost. Ticketmaster argued that a "+Fees" label next to the price was enough warning.
The judge disagreed at this stage, calling the qualifier vague and ambiguous: it tells a buyer that extra charges exist, but not how big they are. She relied on Ninth Circuit precedent that a practice can deceive at first contact even if the full truth turns up later. Ticketmaster has since moved to all-in pricing. The claims over its earlier displays continue anyway.
Tired of Fee Announcements? Go Flat
eventcloud charges one subscription with no per-ticket fees, so platform news stops being budget news.
A purchase limit is a promise to your buyers. The ruling asks who is actually keeping it.
What this means for event organisers
Most conference and trade show organisers will never be anywhere near a BOTS Act case. But two ideas in this order land directly on how you run ticketing, and both come down to pricing and revenue transparency.
First, your purchase cap is a representation you make. The judge found the FTC had plausibly argued that advertised limits could matter both to the artists who set them and to the buyers deciding where to try their luck. Swap "artist" for "organiser" and that is you. If your platform lets one buyer open twenty accounts, the cap on your event page is decoration. Worth asking your provider, in writing:
Is the limit per order, per account, per email address or per payment card?
Does anything flag the same card or the same attendee name across multiple accounts?
Can you see those orders in your own reports, or only if someone complains?
For B2B events the answer is not always "block it". A company buying thirty delegate passes is a customer, not a scalper. The point is that you should decide what a bulk order looks like, not discover it afterwards.
Second, show the whole price at the first number. The US FTC rule on junk fees already requires all-in pricing for live-event tickets, and this ruling suggests courts will look at what buyers saw first, not just what they saw last. If a fee is mandatory, it belongs in the headline figure.
How did a 2016 law end up pointed at a platform?
The BOTS Act passed in 2016 with brokers and their software in mind. It took until January 2021 for the FTC to bring its first cases, against three New York brokers, with a judgment above $31 million that was largely suspended for inability to pay. Enforcement since has mostly followed that template. This summer an FTC settlement with another broker over ticket limits ran to $300,000.
What changes here is the direction. Earlier this year a separate federal court in Maryland let an FTC case against broker Key Investment Group proceed, and Live Nation argued that ruling cast Ticketmaster as the protected party whose defences brokers had got around. This judge noted the Maryland decision does not bind her, but found its logic consistent with her own: holding brokers liable does not rule out holding a platform liable too. If that reasoning survives, "we are only the marketplace" gets harder to say out loud.
Where the business model comes into it
Strip away the legal vocabulary and the FTC's theory is about incentives: a platform that earns a percentage on the first sale and another on the resale has less reason to stop the same seat being sold twice. Whether that happened here is for the court.
Our own view is simple, and it is about the model rather than the defendant. eventcloud charges a flat per-user subscription with unlimited events, tickets and registrations, and takes no percentage of any ticket, first sale or otherwise. The price is the same whether you sell 500 tickets or 50,000, so there is no volume for us to protect. It is built for in-person events only, and you pay per user from one seat upwards. The pricing page has the numbers.
