The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently issued a significant Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) decision in Steidinger, et al. v. Blackstone Medical Services, holding that text messages are not “telephone calls” for purposes of the private right of action contained in Section 227(c)(5) of the TCPA. The case involved plaintiffs who alleged they received unwanted marketing text messages despite being listed on the National Do-Not-Call Registry and attempting to opt out. Affirming dismissal of the lawsuit, the court concluded that Congress deliberately limited Section 227(c)(5) to “telephone calls” and did not extend the provision to text messages. The court emphasized that elsewhere in Section 227 Congress used broader terms, such as “telephone solicitation,” which the TCPA expressly defines to include both calls and messages. Because Congress chose narrower language in Section 227(c)(5), the court found that text-message claims fall outside that specific TCPA private right of action.
