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About four months ago, I blogged in detail about the Satterfield v. Simon & Schuster case that defined how the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) can be applied to mobile marketing. A recent decision in another case, Abbas v. Selling Source, has further strengthened the FCC’s position on mobile spam.

In Abbas v. Selling Source, the plaintiff, Sadat Abbas, claimed that Selling Source sent him and others like him unsolicited text messages in violation of the TCPA. Selling Source defended, saying that a text message did not qualify as a call under the TCPA, and also that the plaintiff could not sue for damages because he did not incur any charge for receiving the text message.

The District Court of Northern Illinois ruled in favor of the plaintiff, concluding that a text message was indeed a call under the terminology of the TCPA, citing Satterfield v. Simon & Schuster in its ruling. The court also held that a person does not need to be charged to receive the text message in order to maintain a suit under the TCPA.

There is no longer any excuse for believing that the TCPA doesn’t apply to text messaging. And it doesn’t take a leap of faith to come to the conclusion that this applies to MMS messaging and IM as well. The golden rule of mobile marketing is to make sure that the consumer opts in to the marketing conversation.