Comment Re:Got it wrong in one (Score 1) 317
An "established business relationship" is a voluntary two-way communication which has not been previously terminated. If you tell them not to call you any more, they must stop.
Voluntary in the sense that they still have business dealings with the union? Sounds voluntary to me.
But use of the phone system is unauthorized EXPLICITLY once you've explicitly told them to stop calling you.
Only if you aren't covered by one of the exceptions.
I'm authorized implicitly to cut across your yard if you don't have a "no trespassing" sign, but I'm trespassing the instant you tell me to leave and I don't. The same principle applies here.
Not sure where you live, but that's not true in Texas.
A phone call is information. Inside the telephone system, it's just binary information. But I was referring more to the mass email campaign anyway, not the phone calls.
Like I said, pretty much anything can be described as information. It's not what this law was intended for. We already have laws that specifically cover what you can and can't do with robocalls, so trying to apply this one is just wrong. And if you don't describe the phone calls as information, then they aren't covered under this law.
As far as the email is concerned, I think that the free speech of individuals outweighs the inconvenience to the company. Especially since they could easily address it themselves if they had even a halfway competent admin. Judging by the quick overload of their system, under a rather paltry load by most standards, they don't currently have one. The servers at my office have to fend off millions of spam emails per day. The thousands that were being sent by the union would probably barely get noticed by the server, and would be quickly cut off from the mail recipients once the admins were alerted.