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Godwin is not a dispassionate observer. If I read his biases correctly, he believes that it's better for children to live in an adult world than for adults to live in a child's world, better for the guilty to go free than for the innocent to be punished, that freedom is not a means to an end but a human need.
Godwin has been involved in some landmark cases involving the Internet, sometimes only peripherally. The book is organized around those cases, and although it does justice to the cases and to the law, it is hardly dry legalese. Godwin is a surprisingly readable writer. In part it's because he is passionate about what he's writing; in part, because the issues are so important. But it's also because he's a good writer.
Cyber Rights addresses the whole range of speech issues on the Net: libel, what it means, and whether the concept even applies to the Net; hate speech; privacy; copyright and other intellectual property issues; censorship, obscenity, and whether there's any sense in applying community standards to a global medium. The capstone of the book and of Godwin's career to date is the defeat of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a triumph of common sense over FUD.
-- Michael Swaine