Mike Godwin
From Free net encyclopedia
Current revision
Image:MikeGodwin.jpg Mike Godwin is an American attorney, perhaps best known on the Internet as the creator of Godwin's Law. He is currently a research fellow at Yale University. Prior to that appointment, he was legal director of Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization concerned with intellectual property law. He also served as the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (joining the fledgling organization in 1990) and as a policy fellow for the Center for Democracy and Technology. He is a former editor (1988-89) of The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at The University of Texas at Austin.
While a law student in 1990 in Austin, Texas, Godwin, who knew Steve Jackson through the Austin bulletin board system community, helped publicize the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. His involvement is later documented in the non-fiction book The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) by Bruce Sterling. (The text of The Hacker Crackdown is freely available via Project Gutenberg (HTML version).) Godwin's early involvement in the Steve Jackson Games case led to his being hired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation; shortly afterwards, as the first in-house lawyer for the EFF, he supervised EFF's sponsorship of the Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service court case. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993.
As a lawyer for EFF, Godwin was one of the counsel of record for the plaintiffs in the case challenging the Communications Decency Act in 1996. The Supreme Court decided the case for the plaintiffs on First Amendment grounds in 1997 in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union. Godwin's work on this and other First Amendment cases in the 1990s is documented in his book Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age. which was first published in 1998, and which was reissued in a revised, expanded edition by MIT Press in 2003.
More recently, Godwin has worked on copyright and technology policy, including the relationship between digital rights management and American copyright law.