Wait, You Mean There's an Actual Godwin?

So I guess the FBI's mad at Wikipedia right now. Why? Because on the Wikipedia page for the FBI, they have a picture of the FBI seal.

And they're threatening legal action if it's not removed.

I'll give you a moment to digest that idea.

Funny as that is on its own (government heraldry is not a class of protected image in any way, shape or form - nor should it be for reasons that should be obvious), it seems in the Cease & Desist letter to Wikipedia, they actually redacted the parts of the law they were citing (18 USC 701) that were inconvenient to their interpretation.

I'll give you another moment.

Wikipedia's lawyer, one Mike Godwin, has responded to their threat and put his response up on the interwebs for anyone to peruse. A choice bit I'm rather fond of personally:

It’s clear that you and Mr. Binney took the hint, although perhaps not in the way I would have preferred. Entertainingly, in support for your argument, you included a version of 701 in which you removed the very phrases that subject the statute to ejusdem generis analysis. While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section
701 that you forwarded to us.

I've got a big rant on Law Enforcement and media technology that I've been allowing to bubble in the back of my brain for a while, and now seems an okay opportunity to go into it... But, nah. I'll wait until another time. Instead, I'd like to talk about Mike Godwin, Wikimedia's lawyer.

Apparently, this is not just any old lawyer - this guy is the Godwin from which Godwin's Law gets its name. (For those of you who don't know what Godwin's Law is, it's a rule about internet discussions that goes as follows: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." A commonly-cited subrule also states that the party that invokes the Nazi comparison is probably the one who's just lost the debate in question.)

Interestingly, Mike Godwin was also, once upon a time, first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and his first work was the case against the Secret Service on behalf of Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games), whom he knew from his days on an Austin BBS. This was the infamous incident involving the raid on SJ Games' computers back in March of 1990, due to a misunderstanding on the parts of the completely competent Secret Service guys, who thought that GURPS: Cyberpunk held detailed instructions on real-life computer hacking and credit fraud.

I had no knowledge of most of this stuff an hour ago (well, I knew about the SJG raid), but now that I know it my life feels one step closer to being complete.

...

Oh, and I finished another character design. Here ya go, you quiet readers you.