CJ / Chris / John / Steve / any and all future aliases:
Your reply was to a comment in which I had already noted a split in the available statutory relief. Let's do this again the hard way.
Congress made a concession to the industries affected that some violations would be subject to less severe penalty than others. The first time you see "private right of action" it refers to its own subsection which talks about "restrictions on use of automated telephone equipment", basically the abuse of autodialers and canned messages and calls to specific places which deserve special protection.
A plaintiff may, on top of requesting injunctive relief, claim actual or statutory damages, one excluding the other. The stat award is a flat rate.
The second time you read "private right of action", that part refers back to "protection of subscriber privacy rights", which covers DNCR violations and maintenance of internal no-call lists, to my comprehension. The types of relief are nearly the same, except that plaintiffs need at least two violations within twelve months and the stat $500 is a cap, not a flat award. Now to compare that subtle difference which the quick glance will miss:
47 USC § 227(b)(3)(B) - "receive $500 in damages for each such violation"
47 USC § 227(c)(5)(B) - "receive up to $500 in damages for each such violation"
As to my reliance on "old dated information", [sic] I am reading all this from the PDF copy at Cornell Law School, accurate through January 2012, about the time the FCC issued major revisions with respect to the "prior consent" issue and adding requirements to provide an automated "opt out". I had to abandon the PDF file from the FCC, which everyone else here keeps tapping with impatient fingers, since it's dated March 2007. I would note that the statutory award split has not changed in the past decade, so a careful review of either version would have revealed this.
(Years ago I'd found a similar problem with the FTC hosting a long outdated HTML copy of the FDCPA, which did not reflect the 2006 amendments or Dodd-Frank. That's when I found that Cornell's copy was fully updated and provided a handy PDF download. The FTC's PDF copy is from May 2013 and also fine for now.)
For something which was intended for use by "private attorneys general", the TCPA is not really user-friendly. Even the lawyers and judges can't agree to what it says, and it took two decades and a SCotUS decision to verify that a federal law question may in fact be heard in federal courts. All said, you and I don't get many "do-overs" if we get it badly wrong in litigation. We don't get to pluck out the lines we like and ignore the rest of any statute. Otherwise we prove the case for many forces working hard to dissolve our rights, that the TCPA and its kin inspire only vexatious, money-grubbing rubes who suffered no "real" harm and don't deserve protection.
47 U.S. Code § 227 - Restrictions on use of telephone equipment
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/227
I have already blocked this call through Time Warner which is my phone service.......yet this call came through again! What the heck, Time Warner????? Anyway, this time I answered and it was a robocall about my imaginary time-share that I don't have and never did. I pressed 1 to talk to a human and when he asked my name I said "what makes you think I have a time share?" He hung up on me. I will again try to block!