I may as well shill for StopTicketTouts.co.uk which is an online petition to, eh, stop ticket touts. It’s a good idea, and worth signing for the time it’ll take you, but most online petitions are pretty worthless and I’m not sure this one’ll be any different.
Further to my recent rambling on RSS feeds for upcoming events I’ve remembered a site that did repackage ticket information scraped from the Ripping Records site. It was called Ripped Tickets but sadly seems to be no more. The magic of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine reveals a page from 2005 that shows what they were up to.
The question there is: what happened? Did they get cease&desisted by one of the sites they were scraping? Are they gearing for a relaunch? Too much traffic not enough revenue? Was the site enough for them to sell the idea to someone else and it’s just taking a while? They seem to have been going recently enough that it’s perhaps just down for a server swap/revamp but who knows.