For a blackmailing, ambulance-chasing troll, it's hard not to like the guy.
Stone's story about farming wasn't all invention. For the first years of his life, in the mid-1970s, he lived in Indonesia, where his father had a can't-miss scheme to get rich farming rice. The plan was to use American equipment and simply outperform the locals, but the scheme didn't go quite the way Dad intended. "The workers wouldn't even unload the ships at the docks," Stone says. "They're like, 'No, that's gonna replace our jobs—fuck you Americans!'"
Danny Fulgencio
When it comes to fighting pirates, all's fair for Denton attorney Evan Stone.
Danny Fulgencio
"I hate hardly anybody, but when I think about pirates, I do tend to think about a lot of them as smarmy entitled little brats."
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His father also cheated on his mom, Stone says, and his folks divorced when he was 2. He grew up in San Antonio loving computers, film and music, all of which stuck with him through his college years in Denton.
He studied film at the University of North Texas, and in the middle of his degree he spent a couple years as an exchange student in L.A. It was the late '90s, and extracurricular work took him to the sets of music video shoots for bands such as Metallica, Smash Mouth and Barenaked Ladies.
Along the way, he started a music distribution company of his own called corduroyred, built on a plan to sell music online—$1.50 for each mp3. He had seven bands signed on, and he recalls walking the streets of L.A., getting attention with the Rio mp3 player he carried around—the 32-megabyte model—demonstrating the latest in portable music technology with cuts from his bands.
It was also the golden age of Napster, though, when common wisdom said that music would be free forever. Stone's label lasted just under a year. Piracy sunk his business, he says. "Fuckin' Napster's out there," he says. "Why is anybody gonna pay me $1.50 for my song if they can find it on Napster too? So my vendetta against pirates has been building for years and years."
Stone came back to finish his degree in Denton. Along with some friends, he'd borrow a few cameras from the school and shoot live concert videos. "We'd go out and shoot these live shows, come home and edit it, find the best four songs and put it online," Stone recalls. "That was a lot of fun. I miss that."
He bounced between San Antonio and Denton for the next few years, with a grab bag of gigs substitute-teaching, programming software and hosting live trivia games in Austin. Somewhere along the way, he roomed with a circus performer who taught him how to spit fire. Stone shows me the photo on his phone. "Lamp oil," he says. "It's all the pros use." The trick is to purse your lips together and spew the lamp oil out as a fine mist—that's the way it'll ignite.
During those years after college, he reconnected with an old friend from San Antonio, a girl named Julie. They started playing music together, recording a few songs, and doing video editing. They'd been dating for a few months when Julie got pregnant—"when we got pregnant," Stone says, correcting himself—and they decided to get married.
When their daughter Astrid was born, they gave her his mother's maiden name, Stone, and he took the name too.
Which is funny now, given the ties people imagine between him and the porn star. When he first got out of law school, he went by "E.F. Stone"—precisely to avoid being confused with Evan Stone, the award-winning star of Space Nuts. "When I started taking on porn clients, I said, 'Oh, fuck it,'" he says. "I'll just let them be confused.
"I looked him up," he says. "His birth name wasn't Stone, either."
With a family to support, Stone decided it was time for a course correction. "I said, I want to do something that's interesting, and that I have a knack for, that'll let me make art that I want to make without worrying about whether there's an audience to pay for it," Stone recalls. He runs a music video and film production outfit with Julie called Wolfe-Stone Productions.
That's how he ended up in law school in 2007 at Texas Wesleyan, where he focused on entertainment and intellectual property. No lifelong dreams of being a lawyer, just a quick decision and no looking back.
"When I decide I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it," Stone says.
During law school he worked as a legal counsel at FUNimation Entertainment, the Flower Mound animation studio, where he led a small enforcement team that tracked down bootleg versions of their cartoons for sale or download online, then sent letters to pirates or their Internet providers, asking them to remove the pirated content.
In June 2010, the tech blog ArsTechnica wrote a piece about how the Virginia law firm of Dunlap Grubb & Weaver, calling itself the US Copyright Group, had singlehandedly dragged thousands more defendants into federal copyright suits than anyone ever had before, lumping defendants together, hundreds at a time, and urging them to settle for $1,500.
Another lawyer at FUNimation sent the link to Stone. "Wouldn't it be great if we could do this?" Stone recalls him asking.
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