Interviews: Ask Attorney and Author Mike Godwin a Question

Mike Godwin worked as the first staff counsel of the EFF and served as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been a contributing editor of Reason magazine and was elected to the Open Source Initiative board in 2011. Mike is probably best known however for coining the internet adage Godwin's Law. He is currently general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R Street Institute. Mike has given us some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question (and one comparison involving Nazis or Hitler) per post.

Comments

Re:What law would you add/change?

[mi]

I doubt, a Reason-contributing Libertarian would be adding new laws. Though, technically, abolition of an existing law is itself a law, we may be better off asking, what Mr. Godwin would start with dropping.

Oh, great ...

[gstoddart]

Godwin'd from TFS ... now what?

CISPA, PIPA, & Anarchy

[bill_mcgonigle]

Mike, I appreciate your work on CISPA/PIPA and related tragedies - thank you.

At this point, is there any real benefit to resist them aside from social signalling? It seems that with the massive centralization of power and the near-complete abandonment of representative government in the US (and elsewhere abroad similarly afflicted), we're left with a situation where every one of these draconian bills will be coming up again and again, funded by the rent-seekers and their corrupt political allies until the grass-roots runs out of steam and finally it's attached to a bill that funds the program that removes lead from baby formula, and sails through on a voice vote on the Friday before Labor Day. It doesn't even matter at this point if the full text of a plan to kill all the puppies and kittens makes it up to Wikileaks - once they want something, it's a fait accompli and then "we" spend the next 25+ years mopping up the mess.

Why should we continue to street-fight on their turf instead of investing our scarce resources in building mutual-defense alliances against these predatory regulat[ors,ions]?