The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed a lower court’s summary judgment ruling in favor of a defendant that was accused of violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act when it communicated with the plaintiff via text messaging, ruling that the platform used by the defendant did not meet the definition of an automated telephone dialing system.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Pascal v. Concentra can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff filed a class-action lawsuit after receiving one text message from the defendant, which was promoting a career for physical therapists. The defendant allegedly sent the text — without the plaintiff’s consent — to nearly 3,600 physical therapists across California. The defendant used a messaging platform to send text message campaigns. But because the platform did not store or produce randomly or sequentially generated telephone numbers, a District Court judge ruled that it did not meet the definition of an ATDS.
That definition was set in Borden v. eFinancial, a ruling from the Ninth Circuit that was issued last year. In that ruling, the Ninth Circuit — interpreting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Facebook v. Duguid — determined that in order for a platform to be considered an ATDS, it must generate or store telephone numbers.
In filing his appeal, the plaintiff argued that the Supreme Court’s ruling defined an ATDS as a device that has the “capacity either to store a telephone number using a random or sequential generator or to produce a telephone number using a random or sequential number generator.”
But the appeals court wrote, because the platform in question “did not store or produce randomly or sequentially generated telephone numbers, Concentra’s text message was not sent to Pascal via use of an autodialer in violation of the TCPA.”
