Junk fax unlawful to send an individual an unsolicited sales and marketing fax without any prior consent of the customer. If the fax receiver is a company or corporate instances, fax communications are permitted unless the subscriber has previously notified the caller that such communications should not be sent on that line; or the subscriber’s line is listed in the register kept under regulation 25 of PECR. This register is maintained on behalf of OFCOM by the Direct Marketing Association and is branded as the Facsimile Preference Service (“FPS”). Unsolicited faxes are regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and
Junk fax in the number of fax machines in the U.S. The invention of the computer-based fax board in 1985 by Dr. Hank Magnuski, provided an efficient platform for reaching those fax machines with minimal cost and effort. The fax machines of this period typically used expensive thermal paper and a common complaint about junk faxes was that they consumed that expensive paper without permission, thus shifting the cost of printing the advertisement to the recipient. In the U.S., the passage of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in 1991 along with action by individual states reduced the use of junk faxes at