California’s speculative-ticket ban takes effect January 1. Two venues didn’t wait — and their evidence is a timestamp any 120-cap room can take.

The useful thing in this quarter’s ticketing law is not a bill. It is a screenshot with a time on it.

California signed a speculative-ticketing ban. Congress has one that passed the House 409–15 and has sat on the Senate calendar since September 2025. And two independent venues stopped waiting for either, and sued StubHub under advertising law that already exists.

Only the third of those is available to you before January 1 — and what it rests on is a measurement you can run on your own On-Sale Window this week.

California signed a speculative-ticket ban, and it does not reach who most summaries say it reaches

AB-1349 (Bryan) was approved by the Governor on September 27, 2026 and chaptered the same day as Chapter 474, Statutes of 2026. Not pending, not awaiting signature. The Assembly concurred in the Senate amendments 67–0 on August 31.

It takes effect January 1, 2027 — and that date comes from the California Constitution’s default rule for statutes enacted at a regular session (Art. IV §8(c)(1)), not from anything inside AB-1349. The bill carries no operative-date clause of its own.

New Business and Professions Code §22502.1 makes it unlawful to advertise, list, offer, or sell a ticket you neither possess nor have authorization from the venue or presenter to sell. Then read who that reaches. A “speculative ticket sale” is defined as one made by a person “other than a ticket resale marketplace.”

So the sentence not to write is “StubHub’s listings are now illegal in California.” A marketplace cannot commit a speculative ticket sale under this act. Its duty is narrower and sits in §22502.1(b): not to knowingly or recklessly facilitate one, and to “implement reasonable measures designed to prevent speculative ticket sales on its platform.”

That second clause is the one worth a promoter’s attention. It is the statutory form of the complaint two venues are already making in court.

The remedy is narrower than the summaries too. §22502.3 makes a seller liable to the purchaser for two times the contracted price — but only where that seller violates the section and “fails to supply a ticket at or below a contracted price or within a contracted price range.” Violation and failure to supply, conjunctive. It is not a bounty on a bad listing, and the bill’s own digest says so.

The section that matches what the venues are pleading is the advertising one

New §22505.6(a) makes it unlawful to advertise, market or offer tickets “in a manner that is likely to mislead a reasonable consumer regarding the source, sponsorship, authorization, availability, price, or nature of the ticket being offered.” Availability is the word doing the work.

Subdivision (c)(4) adds a tighter fit still: you may not represent “that a ticket listing reflects a specific seat, section, row, or location if the seller does not have a reasonable basis to make that representation.”

Note what those two cover that the obvious candidate does not. Subdivision (c)(2) bans claiming an event is sold out when tickets remain available from the original seller. A banner reading “Only 1% of tickets left” is a scarcity claim short of sold out — so it is an (a) problem and a (c)(4) problem, not a (c)(2) one.

One fence, because it is load-bearing: AB-1349 is California law and it reaches neither lawsuit below. One is in New York federal court; the other is in the Eastern District of Louisiana. The frame is not that this statute helps these venues. It is that California wrote down as statute the conduct that was already actionable somewhere else.

Congress has had a speculative-ticketing ban one vote from the Senate floor since September 2025

H.R. 1402, the TICKET Act, mandates all-in pricing and bans speculative ticketing. It passed the House 409–15 on April 29, 2025, and was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar on September 16, 2025, where it has had no floor vote scheduled since (MBW).

Its spec ban carries an exception for services that obtain tickets on a buyer’s behalf — the “concierge service” carveout. The National Independent Venue Association objected to it the week the bill passed: “the inclusion of a ‘concierge service’ carveout, as written in the TICKET Act, would undermine the speculative ticket ban” (NIVA, April 2025, per MBW).

Their objection to S. 281, the Senate twin, is the same objection in different words — the bill “fails to fully prohibit speculative ticket sales” (NIVA statement, September 2, 2026). Fully is carrying that sentence. The complaint is the carveout, not an absent ban.

The clean vehicle is newer. The GHOST Act (S. 5278, Sen. Ben Ray Luján) would ban speculative ticketing nationwide with no concierge exception, and give the FTC and state attorneys general the enforcement. The one with the loophole has been on the Senate calendar since September 2025.

For what has actually moved federally versus what is parked — and why the only binding federal rule on ticket pricing came out of an FTC rulemaking rather than a vote — we ran that scoreboard separately in the resale-cap patchwork.

Two venues stopped waiting, and both are suing on advertising law rather than ticket law

Stone Church, in Brattleboro, Vermont, filed first — August 10, 2026, in the Southern District of New York (FSO, LLC v. StubHub, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-06823, Dkt. 1). The complaint alleges false advertising and trademark infringement and seeks more than $5 million (Vermont Public, reported by MBW). The Howlin’ Wolf in New Orleans filed 31 days later, on September 10, in the Eastern District of Louisiana, under Lanham Act §43(a) and Louisiana’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law.

Everything that follows is an allegation. We have not read either complaint; the figures below come from MBW’s reporting of the Howlin’ Wolf filing. StubHub says the claims are “without merit” and that it intends to “vigorously defend this case.”

In the Stone Church case StubHub is defending in court as well as in public: it filed a Rule 12 motion to dismiss on October 16, 2026, and briefing is underway (S.D.N.Y. docket, Dkt. 13). No court has ruled on any of it.

The measurement the case is built on: at 8:15am on September 7, the filing says, all 100 general admission tickets for a Hot 8 Brass Band show in the Howlin’ Wolf’s roughly 120-capacity Den room were still unsold on the venue’s own website, at $24.94 all-in. StubHub, the complaint alleges, advertised tickets to that same show at $76 all-in, beneath a banner reading “Only 1% of tickets left,” with the listing itself labelled “Only 4 left.”

The show was nine days out.

That is roughly three times the venue’s own all-in price, on a listing claiming scarcity against an inventory that was, on the venue’s side, entirely unsold. Read it as what it is — one show at one minute, an advertising measurement, not a markup rate you can generalize to a platform or a market.

Research cited to Congress puts professional sellers at 70–80% of tickets sold on resale sites, which we covered in the secondary markup’s house player. This is the advertising half of that story: not who holds the tickets, but what a listing claims about tickets nobody holds. Illinois already has a name for it on the books — ghost ticketing, which we covered when that state banned it.

Howie Kaplan, who owns the Howlin’ Wolf and is also NIVA’s Vice Chair of Advocacy — the same trade body pressing the federal carveout objection above — states the theory plainly: “StubHub’s own terms of service state you cannot sell speculative tickets on their site. What are they doing to stop it? Nothing.” And: “We have shows with zero official box office tickets sold, yet speculative listings are live on StubHub” (Hypebot, September 24).

Hold that against §22502.1(b). The duty California wrote and the complaint Kaplan is pressing land on the same verb — prevent.

Two disclosures, because they change how much these cases weigh together. These are two venues, not two independently arrived-at suits: Kaplan is an officer of the trade body making the federal argument, and he has a prior relationship with Stone Church’s circle. And on why he went to court rather than a statehouse, he says a bill he backed was pulled before it reached a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. He is careful about the framing himself: “I don’t think it’s something I got started… I think it’s just a continuation of all the problems that are plaguing independent venues right now” (CelebrityAccess, September 15).

The one for Monday

Both complaints are built from the same artifact, and it costs about ten minutes per on-sale.

1. Pick a named show with a public on-sale. Fix a minute — write down the date, the time, and the time zone.
2. At that minute, record your own remaining inventory and your own all-in price, fees included. Screenshot the public box office page a buyer would see, not your admin view.
3. At the same minute, capture every resale listing for that show: the asking price all-in, and the exact text of any scarcity or urgency banner on it.
4. Repeat at announce, at announce-plus-seven, and on day-of. Four pairs is a pattern; one pair is an anecdote.
5. Keep them together. A hundred unsold seats and an “Only 4 left” banner at the same timestamp is a document. A memory of it is not.

You do not need January 1 to run that, and you do not need the Senate calendar. What those two venues had that a thousand frustrated operators did not is a file with a time on it.