Law Commons^™

The Evolving Landscape Of Tcpa Consent Standards And Ways To Minimize Risk, Misa K. Bretschneider

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Given the exponential growth in mobile phone usage, more businesses are adopting mobile communication strategies to engage with existing and potential customers. With 97% of all mobile marketing text messages being opened by their intended recipients, mobile text message marketing is both effective and lucrative. However, businesses must ensure that such messages comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which generally prohibits sending unsolicited commercial text messages. Indeed, TCPA litigation has become the recent darling of class action lawyers due to uncapped statutory damages and is sure to increase with the heightened consent regulations promulgated by the Federal Communications …

Aereo And Cablevision: How Courts Are Struggling To Harmonize The Public Performance Right With Online Retransmission Of Broadcast Television, Sam Méndez

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Americans increasingly turn to the computer instead of the television to gain access to their favorite shows. With this in mind, Aereo allows its subscribers to stream broadcast television content to their computers, but does not compensate the broadcasters for these retransmissions. The broadcasters argue this violates their public performance right under the Copyright Act’s Transmit Clause, but because of Aereo’s curious technology platform, in which thousands of tiny antennas are each assigned to a unique subscriber, infringement is uncertain. The Supreme Court will soon hear American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc., arising out of the Second Circuit, …

Communications Privacy For And By Whom?, Ryan Calo

Articles

A response to Professor Orin Kerr's The Next Generation Communications Privacy Act, which makes a series of quiet assumptions, however, that readers may find controversial.

First, the Article reads as though ECPA exists only to protect citizens from public officials. According to its text and to case law, however, ECPA also protects private citizens from one another in ways any new act should revisit.

Second, the Article assumes that society should address communications privacy with a statute, whereas specific experiences with ECPA suggest that the courts may be better suited to address communications privacy—for reasons Professor Kerr himself offers. …