Recent settlement makes calling and texting more difficult

What credit unions must do to stay in compliance with TCPA.

A case bound for the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve the issue of how an automated telephone dialing system is to be interpreted under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act was settled out of court on Feb. 15.

In September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in Marks v. Crunch San Diego, LLCthat the TCPA’s definition of an ATDS was “ambiguous on its face” regarding whether the phrase “using a random or sequential number generator” modifies both “store” and “produce.” The court interpreted the TCPA to mean an ATDS is “not limited to devices with the capacity to call numbers produced by a ‘random or sequential number generator’ but also includes devices with the capacity to stored numbers and to dial store numbers automatically.”

This decision differed from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in ACA International v. FCC, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Dominguez v. Yahoo, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in King v. Time Warner Cable, which ruled the term “capacity” in a more limited manner to mean a device’s present functions to dial randomly or sequential phone numbers.

 

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