Like most sensible people, we viewed the recent story about an actor suing the Internet Movie Database for publishing her real age with a certain degree of suspicion. Surely neither she nor her lawyers – who alleged the litigant lost work as a result – could be taking this seriously. Well, it turns out that two major acting unions think differently.

Issuing a joint statement, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists said IMDb had a “moral and legal obligation not to facilitate age discrimination in employment”. The statement continued: “An actor’s actual age is irrelevant to casting. What matters is the age range that an actor can portray. For the entire history of professional acting this has been true, but that reality has been upended by the development of IMDb as an industry standard used in casting offices across America.” Really? Will IMDb now be barred from indicating an actor’s ethnicity in case such a slip facilitates racial discrimination?