Mike Godwin
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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. Godwin 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 (1988-1989) of The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at The University of Texas at Austin, where he graduated first with a bachelor of arts degree in Plan II Honors, and then later with a juris doctor degree.
While a law student 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 ([freely available] via Project Gutenberg). 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 its sponsorship of the Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service case. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993.
Also 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 United States 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 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.
External links
- [Godwin's Law] — Mike Godwin's blog
- [Cyber Rights: About Mike Godwin]
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