In the annals of stupid legislation, California's attempt to fight ageism at Hollywood studios by targeting third-party websites and using the First Amendment as a doormat will secure a prominent place in infamy. Rising from the ashes of a failed lawsuit brought by an actress who claimed IMDb cost her untold amounts of wealth by publishing her age, the law basically said IMDb couldn't publish facts on its website. Those pushing the legislation included the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which apparently doesn't have the spine to stand up to studios and target them for discriminating against actors and actresses.

Last year, IMDb secured a temporary injunction against the state of California, forbidding it from enforcing the law while the courts sorted out its constitutionality. That day has arrived. A federal court has declared the law unconstitutional and permanently blocked California from going after IMDb because Hollywood producers participate in discriminatory hiring.

The decision is short. It takes only six pages for the district court to destroy the state's arguments. If SAG really wants to do something about discrimination, it should use its collective weight to make changes in the studio system, rather than enable censorship and threaten the same protections that allow movies to be made without government interference.

It's a stupid law and the district court does everything but directly call it stupid during the course of its six-page decision. It points out the state has plenty of ways of curbing age discrimination that don't involve walking all over the First Amendment. The fact that previous legislative efforts have failed is no reason for the state to decide the publication of facts must be banned. The court also notes neither the state nor SAG have shown any causal link between IMDb's publication of actors' ages and age discrimination in Hollywood studios. Even if IMDb's publications make it "easier" for studio heads to discriminate (a point the court does not concede), the statutory remedy deployed by California would only force IMDb to remove age info at the request of subscribers, which means there would still be plenty of data available for studios to "misuse."

It's a resounding loss for both entities - both of which should have known the law was destined for the federal court chopping block while it was still in its infancy. The fact the law even exists seems to indicate both the State of California and the Screen Actors Guild are too cowardly to confront Hollywood studio execs directly.

Finally, the court calls the state and SAG out for being so jacked up about punishing IMDb that they can't even recognize the sort of discrimination they're dealing with.

Although the previously-discussed flaws in the statute are more than enough to strike it down, one final point bears mention. The defendants seem to misunderstand the problem they hope to address through AB 1687. The legislative materials repeatedly cite an article discussing "[t]he commonplace practice of casting a much younger female against a much older male" and lamenting the significant underrepresentation of women in leading roles and in directors' chairs. The defendants describe this as a problem of "age discrimination." While that may be accurate on some level, at root it is far more a problem of sex discrimination. Movie producers don't typically refuse to cast an actor as a leading man because he's too old for the leading woman; it is the prospective leading woman who can't get the part unless she's much younger than the leading man. TV networks don't typically jettison male news anchors because they are perceived as too old; it is the female anchors whose success is often dependent on their youth. This is not so much because the entertainment industry has a problem with older people per se. Rather, it's a manifestation of the industry's insistence on objectifying women, overvaluing their looks while devaluing everything else. The defendants barely acknowledge this, much less explain how a law preventing one company from posting age-related information on one website could discourage the entertainment industry from continuing to objectify and devalue women. If the government is going to attempt to restrict speech, it should at least develop a clearer understanding of the problem it's trying to solve.

That's some fine bench-slapping. Hopefully, it will deter the state and its SAG helpers from rushing back to the legislative halls to take another stab at crafting more First Amendment-violating stupidity.