Robocalls - automated verses stored?

[Jimmy Higgins]

Well, there was a case this week in the Supreme Court over robo telephone calls and texting. Facebook was defending themselves saying that they weren't auto-dialing, but using a database. The Trump Administration was supporting them.

Garner closed, noting that “on Facebook’s reading, it would have been possible even in 1991 to download the entire phone book and auto dial every number with impunity, thousands per minute, as long as you stored the numbers on a floppy disk or hard drive,” rather than a number generator.

In his rebuttal, Clement noted that the awkwardness of reading “store” with “generator” would matter if one of two things were true: either if it were impossible to read them together, or if doing so would render words in the statute superfluous. But it’s not impossible, he asserted, and Duguid’s reading has a bigger superfluity issue because it reads the generator clause out of the statute. The notion of human intervention that Duguid advances, Clement countered, is not in the statute and doesn’t solve the problem in any event: “If I tell Siri to dial a number from one of my stored contacts, that’s about as automatic as dialing gets.”

Yeah, asking Siri to dial for you is an "automated" call. Justice Thomas seemed upset that the 1991 legislation hasn't been updated, which is probably a fair point. But as most of the human justices seemed to point out, the intent of the legislation is clear... so why are we jousting over fucking grammar?!

The article from ScotusBlog is a pretty good review over the case that was heard. SCOTUS will be faced with trying to figure out how to equate the legislation into the 21st century, without having it blanket too many other technologies.