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These are heady days for the journalist that covers telemarketing topics; after a spate of recent and high-profile lawsuits charging companies with violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), recently the Federal Communications Commission (FCC (News - Alert)) issued a declaratory ruling that attempts to clarify the rules around what businesses can and cannot do regarding telemarketing.

The FCC has not released the full text of these rulings, but the final order should be out soon. In the meantime, businesses and the press have been poring over the press release from the FCC that outlines some of the highlights of the declaratory ruling.

Based on the information available today, here’s what you need to know about the new ruling regarding the TCPA:

• Treat every device as an autodialer. The term “autodialer” in the TCPA is defined as any technology with the capacity to dial random or sequential numbers. This broad definition is used as a safety against unscrupulous businesses that might change technology to get around the TCPA or call from a list of numbers to skirt the requirements.
• Text messages to mobile phones are subject to TCPA regulations as much as calls to them.
• Equipment that is used to transmit Internet-to-phone text messages is considered an autodialer, so the caller must have consumer consent before calling.
• Consumers have the right to say no to telemarketing and revoke their consent at any time. With this ruling, businesses need to be ready and able to let consumers opt out immediately and easily.
• If a consumer’s name is in the contacts list of an acquaintance’s phone, it does not constitute consent to receive calls from third-party applications downloaded by the acquaintance.
• Businesses get a pass the first time if they call a number that has been reassigned to a new person, but they violate the TCPA if they call this person a second time.

All of these are relatively common-sense rulings, as one might hope. The ruling by the FCC even allows for emergency exceptions to the rule, such as bank fraud or medical issues that require unauthorized calling.

One group that is worried, however, is the polling community; under the new ruling, pollsters will no longer be able to make random calls for surveys. High-profile statisticians such as political and sports statistics whiz, Adam Silver, have decried the new rules.

But, on balance, the ruling helps more than it hurts because it lays out exactly what is acceptable and what is not. Businesses that ethically use autodialers to make calls to customers who have consented to being contacted should have no problem with the law.