Judge Blocks California Law Limiting Publication of Actor's Ages (politico.com)

mi writes: IMDb has a reason to rejoice. Politico reports: "A federal judge has barred the State of California from enforcing a new law limiting online publication of actors' ages. Acting in a case brought by online movie information website IMDb, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Wednesday that the California law likely violates the First Amendment and appears poorly tailored to proponents' stated goal of preventing age discrimination in Hollywood. The judge expressed deep skepticism that the law, which he said appeared to apply only to IMDb, would have any effect on discrimination. The judge rejected the state's arguments that the law was a regulation of commercial speech, finding that IMDb was acting as a publisher in posting the birthday and age information online." "It's not clear how preventing one mere website from publishing age information could meaningfully combat discrimination at all. And even if restricting publication on this one website could confer some marginal anti-discrimination benefit, there are likely more direct, more effective, and less speech-restrictive ways of achieving the same end," Chhabria wrote in a three-page order.

Comments

Re:Shouldn't age descrimination be allowed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've flown into there. The runway markings are horrible. This is an airport administration problem, not a harrison ford problem.

Cool?

[RyanFenton]

I'm a pretty liberal dude - but this age-information-protection thing is the wrong role for any governance to be playing.

It's an objective, publicly available piece of information. Birth records aren't secret, or in any way protected from public view. Trying to punish websites for listing that among other pertinent details on public figures like actors is just crazy.

That's not to say age discrimination is an unrealistic thing to fear - but this is exactly the wrong way to combat it, akin to punishing kids spreading rumors of an upcoming fight, rather than any of the participants. It's just bad tactics too - objecting to information only spreads that information further (justly called the Streisand effect).

I'm struggling just to wrap my head around how stupid an idea this law was, or who would propose it as a valid way to use law.

Was this some kind of a protest law, or a game of legislative chicken gone wrong?

Ryan Fenton

Re:14th amendment, as (mis?)applied

[AmiMoJo]

Can you or someone else explain how the 1st applies to personal information. Like say I tell the bank my personal details so that I can open an account, are they then allowed to publish those details? What about my bank balance, can they publish that? Obviously they wouldn't want to publish those details, customers would abandon them pretty quickly, what I'm asking is if there is any legal protection.

In the EU such data is heavily protected to preserve privacy. Credit reference agencies, for example, can't reveal certain things that they know but which the law deems irrelevant.