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Revision as of 20:34, 27 March 2009
Mike Godwin | |
|---|---|
 Mike Godwin in 2008 | |
| Born | October 26, 1956 United States |
| Occupation | Attorney |
Michael Wayne Godwin (born October 26, 1956), 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. Since July 2007 he has been general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Education
Godwin graduated from Lamar High School in Houston.[1] 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.[2]
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.[3]
Career in Internet law
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.[4]
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,[5] where he has published interviews of several science-fiction writers.[6]
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 Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School,[7][8] and at the Yale Computer Science Department's Privacy, Obligations and Rights in Technologies of Information Assessment (PORTIA) project.[9]
Godwin was hired as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation in July 2007.[10] Commenting on the self-correcting nature of Wikipedia in an interview with The New York Times in which he freely acknowledged that he had edited his own Wikipedia article, Godwin said, "The best answer for bad speech is more speech."[11]
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.[3]
Godwin was named a member of the Student Press Law Center Board of Directors in January 2009.[12]
Books
- High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace (1996) ISBN 0262621037
- Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech on the Electronic Frontier (1998) ISBN 0812928342
References
- ^ Smith, Evan (August 19, 2007). "Re: A Complete Waste of Time]". TexasMonthly.com. Austin, TX: Texas Monthly. pp. "State of Mine: A Mostly Texas Blog" section.
- ^ A call for TSP independence - Editor Godwin's co-authored letter about Daily Texan reform, July 5, 2005
- ^ a b Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, 1992; download link from Project Gutenberg
- ^ Meme, Counter-meme Oct. 1994
- ^ Reason Magazine - Articles by Mike Godwin: Contributing Editor
- ^ Reason Bruce Sterling interview January 2004, Neal Stephenson interview February 2005, Vernor Vinge interview May 2007
- ^ "People at the ISP". Yale Information Society Project. 2006. Retrieved 2008-01-25., listing Mike Godwin as Resident Fellow, 2005–2006
- ^ "Resident Fellows". Yale Information Society Project. Yale University. 2006. Retrieved 2008-01-25., listing Godwin as Microsoft Fellow, 2005–2006]
- ^ "Education". Yale PORTIA Project. 2007. Retrieved 2008-01-25., listing Godwin as Research Scientist, 2005–2007
- ^ Welcome Mike! - Florence Devouard announcing Godwin's Wikimedia appointment, July 3, 2007
- ^ Noam Cohen (2007-08-20). "Defending Wikipedia's Impolite Side". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-08-20.
- ^ "PRESS RELEASE: Student Press Law Center Welcomes Virginia Edwards as Chair; Patrick Carome and Mike Godwin to Board of Directors".
External links
