Mike Godwin

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Mike Godwin

Mike Godwin is an American attorney. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and created the Internet adage Godwin's Law.

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.^[1] Godwin's early involvement in the Steve Jackson Games case 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), and was reissued in a revised, expanded edition by MIT Press in 2003.

Godwin 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. In recent years, Godwin has worked on copyright and technology policy, including the relationship between digital rights management and American copyright law.

Godwin has also served as a policy fellow for the Center for Democracy and Technology.