Strip Club Beats TCPA Case With Human Intervention

The Sapphire Gentlemen's Club in Las Vegas sends promotional text messages to its customers. Doing so involved multiple steps. First, a Club employee inputs telephone numbers into a mobile marketing website. He does this by either manually typing the number or by uploading or cutting and pasting an existing list of phone numbers to the website. Next, the Club employee types the message's content, and designates the specific phone numbers to which the message would be sent. He would then click "Send" on the website in order to deliver the messages in real time or at some future date.

In a decision issued earlier this week, Magistrate Judge Howard R. Lloyd of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that this level of human intervention defeated plaintiff's claim that the Club contacted him using automatic telephone dialing technology in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.