Call it ego or heck I don’t know! What I do know is this is completely absurd on a level I’d never considered before. Hollywood hotshots are using a 2016 law – Assembly Bill 1687 – which was more accurately meant to help lessen potential age discrimination issues among employment is now being used by Hollywood Elite against IMDB for revealing the birthday dates, and in turn the ages, of the actors and actresses of Hollywood.
As written by Elizabeth Nolan Brown for Reason.com:
At issue is a 2016 law (Assembly Bill 1687) ostensibly designed “to ensure that information obtained on an Internet Web site regarding an individual’s age will not be used in furtherance of employment or age discrimination.”
But rather than address age discrimination per se, the law simply bans certain types of websites from publishing accurate age information about certain classes of entertainment workers. As such, it “sets a dangerous and unconstitutional precedent,” claim lawyers for the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), “and should be deeply troubling to all who care about free speech.” …
The way the new law was written, random websites that publish the ages of entertainment professionals are still in the clear. But any “online entertainment employment service provider” that accepts payment for its services falls under the measure’s purview. For such individuals or entities, paid-user requests to remove age information must be honored within five days or else the site risks civil and criminal penalties. These providers are also barred from sharing age info with or publishing it on other sites. …
Becerra argued to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that “if [the bill] is to be considered a speech regulation, it is a valid commercial speech regulation,” because the legislature found “the problem of age discrimination in the entertainment industry to be real, adopted the provision to aid in solving that problem, and matched the restriction to the problem to be addressed.”
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The union which is seeking legal action against IMDB fails to see the irony in their crusade against this form of First Amendment speech.
In its own motion, SAG-AFTRA complained that IMDB “contends it has an absolute First Amendment right to disseminate the ages of everyone in Hollywood, consequences be damned, and no matter how much or little value such expression has in the marketplace of ideas.” But “so long as the communication of the age of persons in the entertainment industry writ large facilitates illegal age discrimination, such expression may be regulated consistent with the First Amendment even though specific communications might not be discriminatory.”
If you ask me this is just another example of how Liberals want to control our lives and even alter history.