Field
The described technology is in the field of computer-implemented data management.
Description of the Related Art
Historically, tickets to events would be issued in person, for example at the venue of an event either beforehand or “on the door” at the time of the event itself. However, nowadays, ticket management is moving more and more into the digital domain, whereby tickets are requested and issued via the Internet. Whilst this is generally beneficial for users in terms of convenience, it nevertheless comes with its own set of problems.
Where tickets are made freely available without restriction, soon touts will follow. Ticket touting is the practice of an entity (tout) acquiring a potentially large number of tickets to, say, an event which they have no intention of using personally, i.e. where they have no intention of attending the event themselves, particularly for the purpose of selling them on at a premium. Whilst popular, oversubscribed events in particular have always been somewhat vulnerable to touting, historically the inter-personal nature of ticket purchases kept touting in check to some extent.
However the problem of touting is being exacerbated as ticket management moves more and more towards Internet based systems. Not only is this removing the inter-personal aspect of ticket acquisition, but a specific problem that has arisen as ticket management becomes digitized is the ever-increasing presence of “bots”. A bot is a software-implemented artificial intelligence deployed on a computer network such as the Internet, in this case acting as a tout i.e. programmed with a function of acquiring a potentially large number of tickets en masse as soon as they become available on the Internet, often in a very short space of time so as to deprive legitimate (i.e. non-touting) users.
A problem also exists regarding ticket allocation and identification. Sometimes a ticket seller or broker will mandate that a ticket purchaser has to show up at the venue with some form of identification (e.g. payment card) to prove that the person showing up is the original purchaser of the tickets, or a legitimate re-purchaser who has re-purchased the ticket(s) via the broker's own system. However, in practice the time and effort this involves, and the delays it would result in, means that this is not enforced in practice. In other words, existing mechanisms for linking identity to tickets are unworkable in practice. This is particularly, though not exclusively true of physical tickets.