Mike Godwin | |
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| Born | Michael Wayne Godwin (1956-10-26)October 26, 1956 (age 68) |
| Education | University of Texas, Austin (BA,JD) |
| Known for | Godwin's law |
Michael Wayne Godwin (born October 26, 1956) is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of theElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and he created the InternetadageGodwin's law and the notion of anInternet meme.[1] From July 2007 to October 2010, he wasgeneral counsel for theWikimedia Foundation. In March 2011, he was elected to theOpen Source Initiative board.[2] Godwin has served as a contributing editor ofReason magazine since 1994.[3] In April 2019, he was elected to theInternet Society board.[4] From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel and director of innovation policy at theR Street Institute.[5][6] In August 2020, he and the Blackstone Law Group filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of the employees ofTikTok,[7] and worked there between June 2021 and June 2022. Since October 2022, he has worked as the policy and privacy lead at Anonym,[8] a "privacy-safe advertising" startup.
Godwin attendedLamar High School in Houston,[9][10] and graduated in 1980 from theUniversity of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Arts degree in thePlan II Honors program. Godwin later attended theUniversity of Texas School of Law, graduating with aJuris Doctor degree in 1990. While in law school, Godwin was the editor ofThe Daily Texan, the student newspaper, from 1988 to 1989.[11]
In his last semester of law school, early in 1990, Godwin, who knewSteve Jackson through the Austinbulletin board system community, helped publicize theSecret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. His involvement is later documented in the non-fiction bookThe Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) byBruce Sterling.[12]
In 2017, Godwin married hotel leasing manager Sienghom "Jessy" Ches. According toPolitico, he was in Cambodia in 2015 to help activists draft an "internet Bill of Rights", and they met in the business center of the hotel where she worked.[13]
Godwin's early involvement in the Steve Jackson Games affair led to his being hired by theElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in November 1990, when the organization was new. Shortly afterwards, as the first EFF in-house lawyer, he supervised its sponsorship of theSteve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service case. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993.[14]
As a lawyer for EFF, Godwin was one of the counsel of record for the plaintiffs in the case challenging theCommunications Decency Act in 1996. TheSupreme Court decided the case for the plaintiffs onFirst Amendment grounds in 1997 inReno v. American Civil Liberties Union. Godwin's work on this and other First Amendment cases in the 1990s is documented in his bookCyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (1998), which was reissued in a revised, expanded edition byMIT Press in 2003.
Godwin has also been a staff attorney and policy fellow for theCenter for Democracy and Technology; a chief correspondent atIP Worldwide, a publication ofAmerican Lawyer Media; and a columnist forThe American Lawyer magazine. He is a contributing editor atReason magazine,[15] where he has published interviews of several science-fiction writers.[16]
From 2003 to 2005, Godwin was staff attorney and later legal director ofPublic Knowledge, a non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C., concerned withintellectual property law. Godwin has worked on copyright and technology policy, including the relationship betweendigital rights management and American copyright law. While at Public Knowledge, he supervised litigation that successfully challenged theFederal Communications Commission'sbroadcast flag regulation that would have imposedDRM restrictions on television.[citation needed]
From October 2005 to April 2007, Godwin was a research fellow atYale University, holding dual positions in theInformation Society Project (ISP) atYale Law School,[17][18] and at the Yale Computer Science Department's Privacy, Obligations and Rights in Technologies of Information Assessment (PORTIA) project.[19]
Godwin was general counsel for theWikimedia Foundation from July 3, 2007,[20][21] until October 22, 2010.[22][23] Commenting on the self-correcting nature of Wikipedia in an interview withThe New York Times in which he said that he had corrected his own Wikipedia article, Godwin said: "The best answer for bad speech is more speech."[24] When theFederal Bureau of Investigation demanded in July 2010 thatits seal be removed from Wikipedia, Godwin sent a "whimsically written letter"[25] in response, denying the demand and describing the FBI's interpretation of the law as "idiosyncratic ... and, more importantly, incorrect."[26][27]
Godwin has been a proponent of net neutrality since 2006, along with other internet advocates such asVint Cerf. When the Wikimedia Foundation agreed with major telecommunications providers to createWikipedia Zero, an application that violated the principles of net neutrality, Godwin believed that the benefits of the program outweighed its negatives. Wikipedia Zero was discontinued in 2018.[28][29][30][31][32][33]
Godwin was named a member of theStudent Press Law Center Board of Directors in January 2009,[34] of theOpen Source Initiative Board of Directors in March 2011,[35] and theInternet Society Board of Trustees in April 2019.[4]
In January 2020, Godwin and the rest of theInternet Society board attempted tosell the .org TLD to private equity.[36]
In June 2021, Godwin took a role as director in trust & safety at the media companyTikTok. In October 2022, he began working at Anonym as the trust and safety lead.[8]
The character "Michael Godwin" in the 1990 bookThe Difference Engine byBruce Sterling andWilliam Gibson was named after Godwin as thanks for his technical assistance in linking their computers to allow them to collaborate between Austin and Vancouver.[12]
Godwin originated Godwin's law in 1990,[1] stating:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of acomparison involving Nazis orHitlerapproaches 1.
Godwin believes the ubiquity of such comparisonstrivializesthe Holocaust, which he finds regrettable.[37][38] He has since made it clear that, in his opinion, thealt-right, especially the participants in the 2017 CharlottesvilleUnite the Right rally, deserve comparisons to the Nazis.[39][40] He has also stated in the press several times, from 2015 to 2023, that informed comparison of U.S. presidential candidateDonald Trump to Hitler could be valid.[41][42][43][44]
In 2017, Godwin married Sienghom Ches. They met while Godwin was on a business trip in Cambodia.[45]
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