Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age

An analysis of the issues of free speech and the right to privacy on the Internet, written by a lawyer frequently involved in such cases, addresses such topics as copyright infringement, hate speech, pornography, and sexual harassment. 25,000 first printing.

YA?Teens growing up with the Net aren't likely to find a better roadmap to the issues affecting their First Amendment future there than this book. Godwin is a pioneering advocate for First Amendment rights in cyberspace and, while this book is an impassioned argument for free speech, he effectively articulates "all sides" in order to make the issues clear. More than this, Cyber Rights reveals the Net to be a community with a human face. Recognizing that many people see cyberspace as marginal, unreal, and lawless, the author counters that image with history, fact, and principled argument. He consistently grounds his consideration of legal issues in human realities, relating his own experience, how virtual communities work (and are still developing), and how people have responded to similar challenges in the past. A fine storyteller, Godwin spins compelling narratives of cases involving issues such as censorship, libel, privacy, and copyright. Troubling "cyberporn" cases are described in all their legal and ethical complexity, and the author shows how the media and the public sometimes have been misled about the facts. He offers useful information about how these processes work and what individual citizens can do to guide them in positive directions. As new legal cases inevitably overtake the ones in this book, Cyber Rights will remain useful for its clear explication of the legal and historical issues underlying those cases?and for the light it sheds on humans in cyberspace.?Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

...[a] substantive work in Cyber Rights.

With an unusually broad view of free speech, lawyer and advocate Godwin, counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, brings his opinions to bear on a slate of Net-related First Amendment cases and policy issues. Citing examples ranging from the landmark Compuserve ruling, in which the court found that an Internet service provider was akin to a bookstore and not a publisher in its culpability for disseminating offensive speech, to the LaMacchia incident, a software piracy case that was ultimately dismissed, Godwin argues for less government intervention, displaying a Panglossian view of the Net's potential. In doing so, he frames nicely some of the issues raised by the encounter of the 200-year-old Bill of Rights and the cutting-edge Internet. But through much of his book Godwin sounds defensive, and his polemics often trump nuanced analysis. By the time he gets to discussing the notorious Time magazine expose on cyberporn, criticizing the magazine for buying into hype, his arguments have become predictable?or flimsy, as when he implies that the Net poses no new risks with its dissemination of dangerous information, such as bomb-making instructions, because libraries have carried such information for years. Godwin's book is a thoughtful examination of an important subject, but its thoughts seem too often filtered through rose-colored screens. Editor, Tracy Smith; agent, General Median.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Godwin treats in some detail a few crucial events in the history of free speech on the Net: the free speech/gender discrimination case at Santa Rose Junior College; the unmasking of the fake cyberporn study by Martin Rimm in Time in 1995; and the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Through it all, Godwin reminds us that open societies are less safe, that allowing free speech is risky, and that the remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech. He wants us to understand that the principles upon which this country is founded are unquestionably worth the risk. He passionately defends, in clear, one-two-three soundbites, the online freedom he wants his daughter to inherit, and he insists that his readers untangle the meanings behind the use of words such as indecency and pornography to frighten and to confuse. He offers lots of ammunition and advice for keeping the Net an open and untrammeled community. None of this is dull--Godwin's dissection of a misinterpretation of Plato's ring of Gyges story in The Republic as a basis for legal opposition to online anonymity is itself worth the price of admission. Most libraries will want copies for both circulating and professional collections. GraceAnne A. DeCandido

An impassioned argument for First Amendment rights in cyberspace is illustrated with compelling narratives of cases involving censorship, cyberporn, libel, privacy, and copyright issues. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.