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Yet another court ruling has affirmed that SMS messages fall under the protection of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The Unites States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois’ Eastern Division has found that a Twentieth Century Fox SMS campaign violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in 1995 when it sent unsolicited SMS messages to customers to promote the DVD release of its movie “Robots.”

Plaintiff Victor Lozano received a number of unsolicited text message advertisements from Twentieth Century Fox, promoting the movie release and other advertisements. Twentieth Century Fox initially tried to have the case dismissed, contending that a SMS did not constute a call under the TCPA. But as we have seen from Satterfield v. Simon & Schuster and Abbas v. Selling Source, the definition of a call has indeed been extended to include SMS/MMS messages.

Bottom line - Consent is absolutely essential for any SMS or MMS Marketing campaign.