The key question in many Telephone Consumer Protection Act lawsuits is whether the equipment used to call the plaintiff constitutes an autodialer—that is, an “automatic telephone dialing system” or ATDS—within the meaning of the statute. TCPA practitioners have been awaiting the FCC’s guidance regarding the definition of an autodialer. Last spring, the D.C. Circuit set aside the FCC’s expansive definition of that term as arbitrary and capricious. (See our report on the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in ACA International.) Since then, the FCC has been working on its new definition.
The Ninth Circuit apparently couldn’t wait. In Marks v. Crunch San Diego, LLC (pdf), a Ninth Circuit panel held that an ATDS is any “device that stores telephone numbers to be called,” “whether or not the numbers were not generated by a random or sequential number generator.”
Continue Reading Ninth Circuit creates circuit split on what counts as an autodialer under the TCPA