Legal Question in Technology Law in California

Re: Email Law Suite

I presume that this is the same transaction I discussed in another post earlier today (since both involve remarkably similar facts and both refer to Minnesota and California).

If you had agreed to buy a *particular* item, like a set of tickets, the seller would ordinarily have a good claim against you. The fact that he lost out on another buyer helps him and not you, because it shows that he could have been paid if you hadn't put him in this spot.

As I said in my other reply, the fact that you are a minor should get you out of a breach of contract claim, since minors can void their contracts. However, the seller may have a fraud claim against you if you led him to believe you were an adult. In particular, eBay probably doesn't allow minors to bid, and you may have claimed to be an adult when you set up your account with them. This might be construed as a fraudulent representation, since it led the seller to reasonably conclude that he could enforce a contract against you.

Will eBay give him your phone number and address? I don't think so -- not unless he subpoenas that information (in which case they surely would). However, eBay has an insurance program which the seller might invoke to get paid, and then eBay and its insurer might come after you to get compensation. Then again, if your purchase was a private sale and not the result of winning an eBay auction, then eBay and the insurer will probably refuse to get involved.

You don't say what type of tickets these are (Airline tickets? Concert tickets? Amusement park tickets? Movie tickets?) but some kinds of tickets are non-transferrable -- which means that only the original purchaser is authorized to use them. If this is true of the tickets at issue here, then he was acting wrongfully in trying to sell them and that could prove a viable defense. If he acted improperly in closing his auction, then that might be a defense as well.

If the dollar amount involved is small, no one may bother with this -- especially once they realize that you are a minor. Then again, insurers don't like to lose their money and they are often willing to spend more than a case seems to be worth in order to deter others from doing something similar down the road.

Keep in mind also that, in most states, parents are responsible for paying the damages caused by their children's torts. They may be dragged into this mess depending on how things go.