• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, September 28, 2018

The Screen Actors Guild is asking a federal appellate court to reinstate a California law that requires Amazon's IMDB.com to stop displaying actors' ages at their request.

The law (AB 1687) requires providers of “commercial online entertainment employment" services -- a description that applies to Amazon's IMDb.com -- to remove information about paying subscribers' ages upon their request.

Last year, IMDb.com sued to invalidate the law on the grounds that the measure violated free speech principles. U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California sided withIMDb and blocked the state from enforcing the measure, ruling it violates the First Amendment by restricting truthful speech.

The Screen Actors Guild, which supported passage of the bill, is now asking the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse Chhabria's decision.

"The First Amendment does not provide limitless protections," the actors' union writes in papers filed Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The organization argues that the law "is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling public interest -- the protection of entertainment industry professionals from invidious age discrimination."

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is also asking the 9th Circuit to revive the law, arguing it helps prevent age discrimination.

IMDb is expected to respond to the appeal by October 22.

A host of outside organizations, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Wikimedia and Center for Democracy & Technology previously supported IMDb's request to have the law declared unconstitutional.

"If it is constitutional for the government to suppress IMDb’s public site from reporting age information, there will be virtually no limit to the government’s ability to suppress the reporting of many other truthful facts by many other sources," the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued in a friend-of-the-court brief submitted to Chhabria last year. "In an age where the media is struggling to combat the pernicious effects of false news, the truth should not be suppressed."