The Northern District of Illinois uses precedent in ACA International v. FCC.
10/8/2019 9:00
A group of plaintiffs lost their argument in a case based on the ongoing district court debate about the definition of an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) and the capacity to randomly or sequentially generate numbers.
According to an article from Drinker Biddle Partner Michael Daly and Associate Vijayasri Aryama, “Court Holds That Text-Messaging System Must Be Able to Randomly or Sequentially Generate Numbers to Qualify as an ATDS,” the Northern District of Illinois entered a summary judgment against the plaintiffs in Smith v. Premier Dermatology “because it found the system at issue was not an ATDS.”
Plaintiffs in the case brought a putative class action against the defendants claiming they used an ATDS to send text messages about medical marketing communications without consent of their clients’ customers, according to the article.
The plaintiffs based their argument on Marks v. Crunch San Diego after the defendants moved for summary judgment, specifically “to claim the TCPA’s statutory definition would include devices that could not generate random or sequential numbers, but could ‘dial stored numbers automatically,’” Daly and Aryama report.
However, the decision in ACA International v. FCC swayed the court in this case.
“Based on ACA International v. FCC, 885 F.3d 687 (D.C. Cir. 2018), the Smith Court determined that, although ‘[t]here is a certain allure to the conclusion in Marks,’ the 2003 FCC order ‘is no longer binding or in force’ and the TCPA’s statutory definition did not support Plaintiffs’ interpretation of an ATDS,” according to the article.
Ultimately, the court determined the text messages from the defendants did not qualify as a TCPA violation.
Read the complete article: Court Holds That Text-Messaging System Must Be Able to Randomly or Sequentially Generate Numbers to Qualify as an ATDS.