Law barring disclosure of actors' ages violates 1st Amendment, appeals court rules

A federal appeals court on Friday struck down a California law that barred internet sites from disclosing the ages of screen actors. The 2017 law, which the Screen Actors Guild had sought as a means to reduce age discrimination, violates the 1st Amendment, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided unanimously. The law was challenged by the Internet Movie Database -- IMDb.com -- a free website that provides information about movies, television shows and video games and offers encyclopedic profiles of actors. In addition to its publicly available site, IMDb has a subscription-based service for the entertainment industry, known as IMDbPro, which the court described as "Hollywood's version of LinkedIn." Actors, writers, set designers, makeup artists and others create resumes by uploading head shots, prior jobs and biographical information to the site.