‘Strange’ law affecting Hollywood will most likely be overturned, McKenna says

There are a lot of new laws taking effect this year and one in California is quite strange.

This law makes it illegal to post an actor’s or actress’s birth date to a “commercial online entertainment employment service provider,” by which they mean IMDb.

Apparently, some actors and actresses are upset because the website posts how old they are and that can affect the kind of job they get.

To find out if this is legal, I talked to former Attorney General Rob McKenna.

“I think this is unconstitutional and this lawsuit filed by IMDb challenging the law is likely to go up to Court of Appeals or Supreme Court,” he told me. “The Supreme Court has a penchant for taking cases about First Amendment and when they hear the case, they will overturn it in a heartbeat.”

To me, the law appears to punish somebody for publishing the truth. In broadcast media, if you reveal that a non-public figure had an extra-marital affair and you put their name out there, you can be sued for damaging reputation. But this seems different.

“Some of it would have to do with intent,” McKenna said. “And the accuracy of the report…

“Here, is reporting an actor’s birthday a violation of privacy?”

The Screen Actors Guild wants this law, McKenna pointed out. However, they are confusing actual discrimination with information that could be used by someone to discriminate.

I argued that we put other restrictions on free speech all the time and no one questions it. In interviews, you can’t ask someone’s age or ask a woman if she intends to get pregnant. What’s the difference?

“The difference is the context matters a lot,” McKenna said. “IMDb is used by a lot of us. It’s somewhat journalistic. As opposed to an interview setting where we want to prevent discrimination and we do regulate what questions are asked … Context matters a great deal here.”

Of course, if IMDb can no longer post people’s ages, we can always just Google it or look it up on Wikipedia. The information is already out there.

“People release personal info about themselves all the time,” McKenna agreed. “Actors have publicists. Just seems like this law just won’t work.”

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