In Johnson v. Yahoo, plaintiff alleged that defendant violated the TCPA by sending text messages to her cell phone without consent. Defendant moved for summary judgment, arguing the equipment sending the texts was not an ATDS and that the court need not look beyond the statutory definition to decide whether the equipment was subject to the TCPA. The court first concluded that the definition of an ATDS was permissibly expanded by the FCC, that the court was required to follow the orders of the FCC determining that a predictive dialer is an ATDS even if if does not store or produce numbers using a random or sequential number generator, and that the dispositive issue was whether the messages were sent without human intervention. The court then denied the motion, finding there was a disputed factual issue on how the system sent the text messages and whether there was a capacity to text without human intervention.
In Legg v. Voice Media Group, the court was confronted with the same issue as in Johnson v. Yahoo about whether text messages were sent with an ATDS in violation of the TCPA. In ruling on defendant's motion for summary judgment, the court also focused not on the statutory definition of an ATDS, but on the FCC interpretation of a predictive dialer, and found that there were factual disputes about whether the equipment had the capacity to send text messages without human intervention, requiring the denial of defendant's motion.
In Abramov v. I.C. Systems, plaintiff alleged that defendant violated the FDCPA. Defendant served an offer of judgment, and after it was rejected, moved to dismiss the putative class action as moot. The court denied the motion, finding that the offer that did not include the actual damages sought by plaintiff did not offer complete relief, so that the offer would not moot the claim.
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