A Japanese actress is stretching privacy law too far by claiming that the danger of harassment by “aggressive and overzealous fans” makes the Internet Movie Database liable for publishing her real name and date of birth.

Eriko Tamura, who now lives in Los Angeles, sued IMDB this month under the tort of public disclosure of private facts, which is in tension with the First Amendment because it involves the publication of truthful information. The published material must be of a kind that is “highly offensive to a reasonable person” and “not of legitimate concern to the public.”

On its much-trafficked Web site, IMDB has posted an entry for Eriko Sakamoto, Tamura's real name, and also gives her date of birth in the separate entry for Eriko Tamura. Neither of the entries identifies Sakamoto and Tamura as the same person.

But in her complaint, Tamura alleges those facts are private and she has kept them “completely private” because they could be used by “third parties to track down her residence.” Before moving to L.A. to pursue an acting career, she was a teen-idol pop star in Japan who was compared to Britney Spears.

Fans who had access to that information have previously broken into her apartment, the suit says, and IMDB's disclosure

has placed Plaintiff in grave danger of aggressive and overzealous fans that can use the information to locate and harass Plaintiff and her family members.

Tamura, 34, filed the case in Nevada, where IMDB is incorporated and the state Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that a newspaper article which disclosed a man's conviction in a hit-and-run accident 20 years earlier was “of legitimate public concern.”

The balance between the free press and an individual's right to privacy “should be weighted in favor of free speech when the publication involves public facts which have been spread upon a public record,” the court said in Montesano v. Donrey Media Group, 668 P.2d 1081.

There is absolutely nothing in Tamura's complaint that tips the balance toward her privacy rights. While she claims her given name and birth date do “not bear any logical relationship to the newsworthy subject of Plaintiff's professional career and filmography,” IMDB did not cross the line into the “morbid and sensational prying” that is not protected under the First Amendment.

Movie databases and other sources, of course, routinely publish similar biographical facts about other actors. Some Websites even specialize in listing the addresses of celebrities.

As for Tamura's overzealous fans, holding IMDB liable for the potential criminal acts of third parties over which it has no control would set the most chilling of precedents for the media.

By Matthew Heller
3/20/07