Mike Godwin
Michael Wayne Godwin (born October 26, 1956) is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and he created the Internet adage Godwin's law and the notion of an Internet meme.[1] From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. In March 2011, he was elected to the Open Source Initiative board.[2] Godwin has served as a contributing editor of Reason magazine since 1994.[3] In April 2019, he was elected to the Internet Society board.[4] From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R 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 of TikTok,[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.
Mike Godwin
Early life and education[edit]
Godwin attended Lamar High School in Houston,[9][10] and 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 was the editor of The Daily Texan, the student newspaper, from 1988 to 1989.[11]
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.[12]
In 2017, Godwin married hotel leasing manager Sienghom "Jessy" Ches. According to Politico, 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]
Popular culture[edit]
Character in The Difference Engine[edit]
The character "Michael Godwin" in the 1990 book 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.[12]