Opinion ID: 3064792
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The ATDS

Text: The district court erred in holding that there was no genuine and disputed issue of material fact as to whether the system Simon & Schuster used was an ATDS. The district court focused its analysis on whether the equipment used by Simon & Schuster stored, produced, or called numbers “using a random or sequential number generator.” The district court even noted that “the parties’ dispute centers on the phrase ‘using a random or sequential number generator.’ ” With this as its focus, the district court held that “the equipment here does not store, produce or call randomly or sequentially generated telephone numbers, the Court grants summary judgment in the Defendants’ favor: the equipment at issue is not an automatic telephone dialing system under the TCPA.” We find that the district court focused its analysis on the wrong issue in its determination of what constitutes an ATDS. In construing the provisions of a statute, we first look to the language of the statute to determine whether it has a plain meaning. McDonald v. Sun Oil Co., 548 F.3d 774, 780 (9th Cir. 2008). “The preeminent canon of statutory interpretation requires us to presume that [the] legislature says in a statute what it means and means in a statute what it says there. Thus, our inquiry begins with the statutory text, and ends there as well if the text is unambiguous.” Id. (quoting BedRoc Ltd., LLC v. United States, 541 U.S. 176, 183 (2004) (internal quotation marks omitted)). Reviewing this statute, we conclude that the statutory text is clear and unambiguous. [2] When evaluating the issue of whether equipment is an ATDS, the statute’s clear language mandates that the focus 7338 SATTERFIELD v. SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC. must be on whether the equipment has the capacity “to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator.” Accordingly, a system need not actually store, produce, or call randomly or sequentially generated telephone numbers, it need only have the capacity to do it. Since the district court did not focus its decision on this issue, we must then review the record to determine if summary judgment may issue. At the hearing, counsel for the parties suggested that the record was not clear regarding that issue. We agree. Reviewing the record, we find that there is a genuine issue of material fact with regard to whether this equipment has the requisite capacity. Satterfield’s expert, Randall A. Snyder, opined that this telephone system “stored telephone numbers to be called and subsequently dialed those numbers automatically and without human intervention . . . [t]he use of stored numbers, randomly generated numbers or sequentially generated numbers used to automatically originate calls is a technical difference without a perceived distinction . . . .” He later opined that “[t]his is the primary automated function within the platform that constructs text messages and individually enters them into a message queue for subsequent delivery to the cellular networks . . . . The cellular phone numbers residing in the cellular phone number database for the specific application are applied in sequence, as they are stored in the database, to serve as the destination cellular phone number for each individual text message.” However, Snyder never specifically declared that this equipment had the requisite capacity. On the other hand, Jay Emmet, President of mBlox (company responsible for the actual transmission of the text messages and a nonparty in this case), testified that the system used was not capable of sending messages to telephone numbers not fed to the system by mBlox, nor was it capable of generating random or sequential telephone numbers. [3] Therefore, this limited record demonstrates that there is a genuine issue of material fact whether this telephone system SATTERFIELD v. SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC. 7339 has the requisite capacity to be considered an ATDS under the TCPA. Given the conflicting testimony and this limited record, we hold that summary judgment on this issue was inappropriate. We therefore remand to the district court to determine whether the equipment used by Simon & Schuster had the requisite capacity.