Courts May Award Damages Against Publishers for Sending Unsolicited Text Messages

The Publisher Simon & Schuster may soon be forced to cough up the
roughly $90 million in fines and payouts associated with the class
action lawsuit it’s facing for the ill-advised Stephen King promo.
This was made known by the court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
which has decided unanimously that a text message campaign led by the
company that sent an unintentionally threatening message to thousands
of users could cost the publisher $90 million dollars.
In 2003, to promote the then new Stephen King novel, ‘Cell,’ the
publisher used a list of over 60, 000 phone numbers collected by a
third party, not involved in the case, to send the offending text
message. One of the text’s recipients, Laci Satterfield, filed suit on
behalf of herself and the 60,000 others, claiming the company violated
the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The act
prohibits automatic telephone dialing systems from making calls to
non-consensual cell phone owners.
But before the courts could decide on this matter, one issue had to be
settled. Is a text message a phone call? As an answer, the United
States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco handed
down a decision, thus paving the way for the TCPA to be applied to
text spammers. The decision states that the FCC ban clearly
“encompasses both voice calls and text calls to wireless numbers.”
Now, the case will go back to the lower courts to decide if the method
used by Simon & Schuster qualifies as an “automatic telephone dialing
system.”