Law360, Los Angeles -- A California federal judge stopped enforcement of a new California law preventing online entertainment industry databases such as IMDb from including actors' ages on their sites, saying the statute violates constitutional free speech protections and doesn't address its stated goal of preventing age discrimination.
IMDb, which stands for Internet Movie Database, filed suit in November, arguing that it was singled out by Assembly Bill 1687, which violates the company’s free speech rights. The law, which went into effect Jan. 1, calls for commercial entertainment employment providers that offer a paid service for actors to post their profiles for networking and casting purposes to remove, upon the subscriber’s request, the actor’s date of birth within a window of five days. But its subscribers have already been able to do that in the separate paid section of the site, and anything in the public section is factual information that can be found anywhere, IMDb said in its complaint.
IMDb is represented by John Hueston, Moez Kaba and Adam Olin.