Opinion ID: 486483
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: District Court's Method of Calculating Actual Damages

Text: 44 TXP cross-appeals the district court's award of damages. The court awarded TXP approximately $10,000, an amount based upon the lost revenue from the concerts promoted by the one promoter the court found definitely would have chosen TXP over SEATS to provide ticketing services for events staged at the Omni. TXP argues that the court's methodology in calculating the damages was flawed in two respects: 1) the court erred by refusing to calculate damages by looking at TXP's percentage of the ticketing business at the other facilities in the Atlanta area, and 2) the court erred in refusing to calculate into the award damages derived from the promoters who the court found would have used TXP for split-ticketing. 45 The first argument clearly has no merit. TXP insists that the court should have used a comparative percentage theory to calculate its losses; that is, it should have looked to see what percentage of the ticketing business TXP held for shows staged at other facilities--facilities that were unaffected by the tying arrangement. While the courts have awarded damages in tying cases by comparing sales in the restrained market to sales in an unrestrained market, see, e.g., Zenith Radio Corp. v. Hazeltine Research, Inc., 395 U.S. 100, 123-25, 89 S.Ct. 1562, 1576-77, 23 L.Ed.2d 129 (1969), there are sound reasons why such a comparison between Omni ticketing and non-Omni-ticketing would be inappropriate in this case. The court found that the Omni was a unique facility due to its size and configuration: while it can seat up to 16,000, the next largest enclosed facility in the City can seat only 4,000. As the testimony at trial indicated, the ticketing needs for an event for 3,000 or 4,000 people are quite different from the ticketing needs for an event for 15,000 people. 46 This potential difference is important when one considers the qualitative difference between the hard-ticket services provided by TXP and the computerized ticketing services provided by SEATS. Many of the promoters indicated that they would not consider using a hard-ticketing service for a reserved seating show at a facility as large as the Omni, although they would consider using split-ticketing and would not hesitate to use hard-ticketing for a smaller arena. 47 TXP's second argument is also meritless. In considering the damages award, the court only considered events staged by the single promoter, Jim Veal, who testified that he would have used TXP for full ticketing, and disregarded events staged by promoters who testified that they would have only used TXP for split-ticketing. The court apparently did this on the basis of the following reasoning 19 : 1) SEATS had a permissible policy against split-ticketing; 2) given this policy, promoters would have been in a position of selecting either SEATS or TXP for the entire ticketing; and 3) given this choice, there was no evidence that any of the promoters with the exception of promoter Jim Veal would have chosen TXP for full ticketing; in fact, the promoters indicated that they would not choose TXP to ticket a facility as large as the Omni; 20 and 4) consequently, the only actual damages TXP proved were those associated with the loss of Veal's business. 48 TXP challenges this reasoning, primarily on the basis that there was no finding by the court that the other promoters would in fact have selected SEATS if forced to choose between SEATS and TXP. 21 Indeed, it appears that the district court did not in fact make an express finding to that effect: it found only that there was not sufficient credible evidence to determine what other promoters would have used plaintiff's services for entire performances. 49 Concededly, this finding is not an affirmative statement that every other promoter besides Jim Veal would have chosen SEATS to do full ticketing in the absence of the tying arrangement, but a statement that there is not enough evidence to determine what every promoter who has used the Omni during the relevant period would have done. Nonetheless, it does not provide a basis for awarding damages, as the plaintiff contends. Furthermore, many of the promoters testified at trial that they would not use hard-ticketing at the Omni, which means that they would have to use SEATS, although this testimony was not incorporated into the court's findings of fact. Given the lack of conclusive proof that other promoters would have used hard-ticketing systems in the Omni, we hold that the district court reasonably awarded damages based upon what was proven regarding the single promoter who the court found would in fact have used TXP but for the antitrust violation.