LOS ANGELES — Junie Hoang, the actress who sued Amazon and its Internet Movie Database unit for posting her age, can take her complaint — or at least some of it — to a jury.
Judge Marsha J. Pechman, of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, ruled on Monday that Ms. Hoang, whose legal name is Huong Hoang, could proceed to trial with a breach of contract claim and a request for damages related to her career.
But Judge Pechman excluded Amazon as a defendant, leaving only its IMDb unit in the suit; barred any claim by Ms. Hoang for emotional distress; and granted summary judgment denying a claim that the database had violated the Consumer Protection Act by publishing Ms. Hoang’s age without her consent.
“Anyone who values their privacy and has ever given credit card information to an online company like IMDb or Amazon.com should be concerned about the outcome,” Ms. Hoang said Tuesday in a statement.
A call to Amazon’s media relations department drew no immediate response.
In 2011, Ms. Hoang, who is now 41 years old, filed a complaint that said IMDb.com, a widely used film and television database, had illegally used her credit card information to obtain and post her age. The disclosure, she said, exposed her to age discrimination in an industry that values youth — a claim that was bolstered by the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which publicly criticized IMDb for posting the ages of performers and others.
In her order on Monday, Judge Pechman described a series of communications in which Ms. Hoang had first omitted her age when subscribing to IMDb, then submitted a false date of birth that made her appear to be seven years younger than her actual age. Eventually, Judge Pechman noted, Ms. Hoang asked IMDb to remove the false birth date, going so far as to submit a fake Texas identification document to show that it was wrong.
Instead of relying on the fake document, the judge said, an IMDb employee gained access to Ms. Hoang’s credit card information, then used that to ascertain her actual 1971 birth date from a public records database called PrivateEye.
Ms. Hoang’s misrepresentations, the judge said, were not sufficient to bar her claim. But whether IMDb had breached its contract with her, or is liable for damages, must be decided at trial, she said.
In an order issued last August, Judge Pechman set the trial date on April 8 of this year.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/actresss-suit-against-imdb-for-publishing-her-actual-age-can-go-to-trial/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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