A Victorian Gothic church in Brattleboro, Vermont, doesn't seem like the likeliest place to pick a fight with the country's largest secondary ticket marketplace. But that's exactly what FSO, LLC — doing business as the venue Stone Church — did on August 10, filing a Lanham Act complaint against StubHub in the Southern District of New York that reads less like a legal filing and more like a forensic teardown of the platform's checkout page.

The timing is almost too neat. Two days earlier and 2,800 miles west, Assembly member Matt Haney stood under the stage lights at Harlow's in Sacramento making the same argument in political terms: that the modern ticket resale business has stopped serving fans and started fleecing them, and that independent venues are the ones left holding the bag.