New Law A Day: Tennessee's Hannah Montana Ticket Law

Over the weekend, many people logged onto Ticketmaster hoping to purchase one of the few available Tennessee Titans home game tickets available. If you got lucky this year, it might actually have nothing to do with luck, but a new law that took affect this month.

Miley Cyrus on set of "Hannah Montana" movieStates all across the nation passed similar laws this year, mostly in the name of Hannah Montana. Angry parents who couldn't get tickets to her sold out shows let their lawmakers know. In years past, scalpers would bring along friends to ticket counters to snipe a boat load of tickets before the first real customers got to the window. Scalping recently went high tech, with computer programs sniping up tickets faster than a human could enter their name, address, and credit card information.

House Bill 2497 is pretty simple. It makes it an offense for any person to knowingly sell, give, transfer, use, distribute or possess with the intent to sell, give or distribute software that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of interfering with the operations of any ticket seller that sells, over the Internet, tickets of admission to a sporting event, theater, musical performance, or place of public entertainment or amusement of any kind by circumventing any security measures on the ticket seller's website, circumventing any access control systems of the ticket seller's website, or circumventing any controls or measures that are instituted by the ticket seller on its website to ensure an equitable ticket buying process.

Get caught using this "software" and you'll get whacked with a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of $500 or loss of any profits made or tickets acquired in the course of the violation.

I don't know how much this will help... But at least it's a start.