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Oklahoma joins Florida in passing its own version of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) called the "Telephone Solicitation Act of 2022." The legislation is set to take effect on Nov. 1, 2022.
The Telephone Solicitation Act (TSA) applies to telemarketing calls using an "automated system for the selection or dialing of telephone numbers or the playing of a recorded message when a connection is completed to a number called." This definition is different, and more broad, than the definition of an auto dialer espoused by the United States Supreme Court in Facebook v. Duguid, 141 S. Ct. 1163 (2021).
In Facebook, the Supreme Court held that, for equipment to qualify as an automatic telephone dialing system and thereby be subject to the TCPA, the equipment must have the capacity to either store or produce numbers using a random or sequential number generator. Oklahoma law applies to equipment that may not store or produce numbers randomly or sequentially because the TSA captures equipment that may automatically select stored numbers. Companies with systems that are compliant with the TCPA should review their equipment and how the equipment is used to ensure that it does not automatically select stored numbers from a database if marketing to Oklahoma.
The TSA does not just restrict consumer telemarketing either. B2B marketing is also in the mix. Business to business telemarketing calls are exempt from the law if the marketer has been operating for at least three years under the same name and has at least half of its gross proceeds from sales to existing businesses. There are other exemptions as well.
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