Interviews: Ask Attorney and Author Mike Godwin a Question 83
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.
What law would you add/change? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you had a totally free chance to write or change a law - what would you change?
-- Steve
Re:What law would you add/change? (Score:4, Insightful)
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^This. Do you know who else changed laws? HITLER!
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Yes :) He was also a vegetarian, a war hero (WWI) an aquarellist, and loved children — very suspect traits all of them.
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Yes :) He was also a vegetarian, a war hero (WWI) an aquarellist, and loved children — very suspect traits all of them.
Woosh!
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Robert Heinlein, in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", suggested differing standards to pass a new law or repeal an existing one. A new law should require 2/3 support, while repeal should require only 1/3.
Alternatively, here in the United States, all laws are supposed to abide by our Constitution. Require that all proposed laws should explicitly state the provision of the Constitution that authorizes such a law. In the case of drug laws, for example, no such provision exists. We had to have a Constitution
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I dont know about Mr Godwin but I'd love to repeal the Law of Gravity.
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Not sure, I kind of like my couch... I think, I'd start with becoming the nice and round 3 (or, maybe, 4) — to make it simpler computer square footage.
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Darn... Slashdot quietly ate the pi I had there... Unicode, anyone? Hello?
Microsoft and Hitler (Score:2, Funny)
Do you think that Microsoft's introduction of Windows 10 is similar to the way the Nazis seized power? Will Microsoft take all our privacy away?
Godwin Exceptions? (Score:2)
Are there exceptions (or clarifications) to Godwin's Law? What if the topic is about Hitler or Nazis? Is there another law that applies when this mashup happens?
Re:Godwin Exceptions? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, all Godwin's Law is, in its purest form, is a look at probability. The law does not state anything about the quality or lack thereof of the analogy. What you might be thinking of is one of the many corollaries that have been derived from Godwin's Law, and incorrectly called Godwin's Law.
Re: Godwin Exceptions? (Score:1)
Just look at the Hitler Time Travel Exemption Act, a bit different but still amusing.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct
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Oh, great ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Godwin'd from TFS ... now what?
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5 Ways Donald Trump Perfectly Mirrors... (Score:3)
Is Adam Tod Brown of Cracked justified in comparing Donald Trump's rise to power to that of an infamous German chancellor [cracked.com]?
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Wow...that article was equal parts interesting and scary...
Coincidentally, a few weeks ago, I had independently noticed many points of similarity between Trump and Hitler. Glad I'm not the only one. The most obvious thing is this unfortunate penchant for demagogery, specifically, a habit of blaming minorities as the cause of every problem. Let's just hope if can't happen here. But as they say, those who don't learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat history class.
(feel free to discuss - desp
Re:5 Ways Donald Trump Perfectly Mirrors... (Score:5, Funny)
Is it Godwin's law to compare Hitler to Trump, aka in reverse? You know, something like "I was reading about Hitler's rise the other day.... wow, that guy was a total Donald Trump!"
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You should be able to pass history class by regurgitation of memorised facts, even if you don''t actually learn anything from it.
One of my graduating class of geologist - one who actually continues to work as a geologist - was a Young-Earth Creationist. Perfectly capable of understanding and recounting the various evidence, but he just didn't actually believe a word of
Rise of Libertarianism (Score:5, Interesting)
How would you judge the progress, Libertarianism is making in the US? Do you consider it rising, flat, or, perhaps, diminishing as a philosophy?
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Worst Ideas You Didn't Know Come From America (Score:3)
Do you have a generally positive or negative opinion of these people?
Source: "Worst Ideas You Didn't Know Come From America [cracked.com]" by Melissa Dylan
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I mean Henry Ford? Great for building cars on assembly lines. Terrible choice to speak at your son's Bar Mitzvah.
Interesting point. This raises another question:
To what extent ought some heinous actions by a particular person to tarnish the reputation associated with the same person's good actions? Case in point: a dictator who made the trains run on time.
Encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you believe governments / the US Government will succeed in forcing digital communication giants like Apple or Google to either make illegal zero-knowledge encryption methods [slashdot.org] or mandate backdoor decryptors [slashdot.org] to snoop on customer data and communications?
People who can't use google should be exterminated (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"The law and its corollaries would not apply to discussions covering known mainstays of Nazi Germany such as genocide, eugenics, or racial superiority, nor, more debatably, to a discussion of other totalitarian regimes or ideologies,[citation needed] if that was the explicit topic of conversation, because a Nazi comparison in those circumstances may be appropriate"
WHy are you such a fascist? (Score:1)
Hitler was quick to seize on "laws" of human behavior that were merely politically convenient for him, making a mockery of social sciences.
Why are you so much like Hitler in this regard?
Betteridge-Godwin Law? (Score:3)
Should Trump discussions be Godwin-ed? (Score:1)
Recent comments by Donald Trump have invoked comparisons to Nazis and Hitler. These sorts of comments online tend to lead to people invoking the "extended" version of Godwin's Law - that is, the moment Hitler is mentioned, the thread is over and the people who brought up Hitler immediately lose. What are your thoughts on using "Godwin's Law" in a prescriptive instead of merely descriptive manner? Is it something you envisioned when you formulated it?
Relatedly, as a lawyer, do you feel that there's room for
Do you have any other laws we should know about? (Score:1)
Thanks!
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Everyone alive is worse than Hitler. He's dead.
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Everyone alive is worse than Hitler. He's dead.
Bollocks. What about people whose impact is net positive? I'm not going to try to make a list, but I like to believe that there's at least a few of them out there.
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One is current, the other is not. I play guitar better than Hendrix. I think better than Einstein. I write better than Plato. They're all dead.
Of course, we're all better than Hitler too. He's not really anything, he's dead.
Tool to stifle debate? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you concerned that you've become an internet meme and your "law" a tool to stifle debate?
I've seen legitimate comparisons to Nazism shut down because someone pops into a discussion in an almost automatic fashion and invokes "Godwins Law" when the word "Nazi" is used, whether the invocation was within context, or not.
Do you miss USENET? (Score:3)
1) Is this shiny new Interweb thing better than text flooded over UUCP for actually understanding things and for thoughtful conversations? Discuss.
2) If you could by fiat could change one thing technically or legally worldwide to make the online world a more civil place, what might it be? Might Google's 'hate speech' 'spellchecker' delaying or censoring Twitter/FB/etc posts mentioning Hi**er or similar help?
Rgds
Damon
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Joe_Dragon's forgotten his password again.
Can you give some examples.. (Score:1)
Of when you personally compared someone to Hitler or Nazis recently?
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What if we killed Baby Hitler? (Score:2)
The principle behind Goodwin's Law (people resorting to demagoguery against their political opponents, especially online) would presumably still be valid. Do you think there would still be a Goodwin's Law, and if so, who would the comparison be to?
The same question without the "killing baby Hitler" piece: Other than Hitler, do you think there are other demagoguery comparisons that are sufficient
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If there were no Hitler, there would have been no World War II code breaking effort, ergo no electronic computers, ergo no computer networks, ergo no famous 1990 post to Usenet.
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The codes weren't developed by Hitler, and they weren't developed during WW2. The Brits were reading German messages before WW2 started.
And gave us access to the stuff before we entered the war (legally - we were fighting illegally for a year or two before Pearl Harbor - yes, escorting convoys of military supplies to a belligerent was illegal, as well as sinking U-boats), as far as I know.
CISPA, PIPA, & Anarchy (Score:2, Insightful)
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
USA First Use Doctrine in Other Countries (Score:4, Interesting)
Avoiding accidental copyright infringement (Score:3)
You're an author and an attorney, so I assume you know some things about laws specifically designed for authors. Is there a way for a writer, a composer, etc. to be sure that he didn't accidentally infringe someone's copyright when creating his own work? For instance, what should George Harrison have done to avoid infringing a copyright owned by Ronald Mack (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music), Michael Bolton to avoid the Isley Brothers (Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton), or Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke to avoid Marvin Gaye (Gaye v. Thicke)? This is especially difficult for songwriters because of the combinatoric limits of possible melodies [slashdot.org].
Who ordered that? (Score:3)
What Nazi set the requirement that each question for Mike Godwin must have a comparison with Nazis or Hitler to make it a valid post?