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Mike Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the creator of the Internet adage Godwin's Law.
Godwin was hired as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation in July 2007.
Education
Godwin graduated in 1980 from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Plan II Honors program. Godwin later attended the University of Texas School of Law, graduating with a Juris Doctor degree in 1990. While in law school, Godwin served as editor of The Daily Texan, the student newspaper, from 1988 to 1989.
In his last semester of law school, early in 1990, 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.
Career
Godwin's early involvement in the Steve Jackson Games affair led to his being hired by the EFF in November 1990, when the organization was new. Shortly afterwards, as the first EFF in-house lawyer, he supervised its sponsorship of the Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service 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 (1998), which was reissued in a revised, expanded edition by MIT Press in 2003.
Godwin has also served as a staff attorney and policy fellow for the Center for Democracy and Technology, as Chief Correspondent at IP Worldwide, a publication of American Lawyer Media, and as a columnist for The American Lawyer magazine. He is a Contributing Editor at Reason magazine, where he has published interviews of science-fiction writers Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and Vernor Vinge.
From 2003 to 2005 Godwin was staff attorney and later legal director of Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization concerned with intellectual property law. In recent years, Godwin has worked on copyright and technology policy, including the relationship between digital rights management and American copyright law. While at Public Knowledge, he supervised litigation that successfully challenged the Federal Communications Commission's broadcast flag regulation that would have imposed DRM restrictions on television broadcasting.
From October 2005 to April 2007, Godwin was a research fellow at Yale University, holding dual positions in the Internet and Society Project at Yale Law School and at Yale's computer science department. He was hired as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation in July 2007.
Trivia
- The character Michael Godwin in The Difference Engine by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson was named after Godwin as thanks for his technical assistance in linking their computers to allow them to collaborate between Austin and Vancouver.
References
- Mailing list post by the Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees announcing the appointment.
- ^ Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, 1992; download link from Project Gutenberg
- Reason Magazine - Articles by Mike Godwin: Contributing Editor
External links
- Godwin's Law — Mike Godwin's blog
- Cyber Rights: About Mike Godwin
- Meme, Counter-meme, Godwin's article in Wired about coining Godwin's Law
- Godwin's other articles about law and Internet culture in Wired
- Godwin's articles in Reason magazine
- Godwin's book, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech on the Electronic Frontier, at MIT Press
- Godwin's interview of Bruce Sterling
- Godwin's interview of Neal Stephenson
- Godwin's interview of Vernor Vinge