Live Nation and Ticketmaster have rewritten their defense in the FTC's BOTS Act case, trading a shotgun list of 16 affirmative defenses for 12 more pointed ones that tell you exactly how they plan to fight: blame the scalpers, attack the FTC's timing, and make restitution as hard to calculate as possible.
The amended answer, filed Oct. 29 in federal court in Los Angeles as a redline against the companies' Oct. 13 answer, leaves the 33-page paragraph-by-paragraph denials and the combative preliminary statement untouched. The action is all in the back five pages. Latham & Watkins struck four defenses outright, deleted the catch-all reservation of future defenses, and rewrote nearly every survivor to attach a specific factual theory where there used to be boilerplate. The comparison report attached to the filing counts 68 changes: 38 additions and 30 deletions.
The filing lands two days after the FTC and four of the seven plaintiff states (Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Nebraska) demanded a jury trial, and a month after Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong denied the companies' motion to dismiss in full on Sept. 28.
What got cut
The struck defenses are the boilerplate that defense firms paste into almost every answer, and that plaintiffs routinely move to strike for lacking any factual basis.
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