TCPA gets a new lease on life from the 9th Circuit court [telecom]

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The panel vacated the district court's grant of summary judgment to the defendant on a claim under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which places restrictions on the use of automated telephone equipment.

The plaintiff alleged that three text messages that he received from the defendant violated the TCPA. The district court held that the automatic text messaging system that had sent the messages was not an automatic telephone dialing system ("ATDS") under the TCPA because it lacked the present or potential capacity "to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator." After the district court ruled, the D.C. Circuit issued its opinion in ACA Int'l v. Fed. Comm'cns Comm'n, 885 F.3d 687 (D.C. Cir. 2018), invalidating the FCC's interpretation of questions raised by the statutory definition of an ATDS.