EBay bans Obama inauguration tickets

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Planning to buy tickets to President-elect Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony on EBay or StubHub? You’re too late.

EBay, which owns StubHub, has agreed to ban the auction or sale of ttickets for the Jan. 20 event, which are supposed to be free. The listings, which offered the tickets for as much as $7,500 apiece as of Wednesday night, drew the ire of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. That might not normally scare off powerful EBay, but this year Di-Fi is the head of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, and she threatened to introduce a bill in Congress to forever ban the sale of tickets to inauguration swearing-in events.

After one meeting with the committee Wednesday night, EBay folded.

Inauguration tickets will be issued to members of Congress a few days before the event. The representatives and senators will then distribute them to folks they like or at least to whom they owe favors. The president-elect and vice president-elect camps also get tickets for distribution.

Most of the sellers on EBay and StubHub claimed they could get their hands on tickets for resale. The opportunities for scams, however, was one of the reasons the committee asked for the ban.

In all, 240,000 tickets will be given out.

--David Colker