Stanford CIS
Anthony Falzone

Anthony Falzone

Tony Falzone is the Deputy General Counsel at Pinterest, Inc.

Prior to joining Pinterest, Tony co-founded CIS’s Fair Use Project, which he led as its Executive Director from 2006 to 2012. In the course of his work at CIS, Tony represented conductor Lawrence Golan in his challenge to Congress's constitutional power to remove works from the public domain, which he argued before the Supreme Court of the United States. He also represented visual artist Shepard Fairey in copyright litigation against The Associated Press over Fairey's "Obama Hope" posters, and represented RDR Books as trial counsel in its copyright and Lanham Act dispute with J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers over the Harry Potter Lexicon. Those cases followed notable victories on behalf of the producers and distributors of the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in litigation against Yoko Ono Lennon and EMI Records, on behalf of Professor Carol Shloss in her lawsuit against the Estate of James Joyce. Tony also represented a wide array of organizations as amicus curiae in federal appeals courts throughout the country, including The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Creative Commons, and the American Library Association. In addition to litigating, Tony advised dozens of documentary filmmakers, writers, artists and other content creators on fair use and other intellectual property issues.

As a Lecturer in Law, Tony has taught both lecture and clinical courses at Stanford Law School, including Fair Use in Film, Advanced Topics in Cyberlaw, and the Cyberlaw / Fair Use Clinic.

Prior to his work at Stanford, Tony was a litigation partner in the San Francisco office of Bingham McCutchen. He is a 1997 graduate of Harvard Law School, and was a law clerk to the Hon. Barry T. Moskowitz, U.S. District Judge, Southern District of California.

Recent articles

Blog

Tim Wu On Why Rowling Is Wrong

Today on Slate, Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu lays out an excellent explanation of why RDR Books has the right to publish the Harry Potter Lexicon, and why J.K.…

Case

Kahle v. Gonzales

In this case, two archives challenged statutes that extended copyright terms unconditionally—the Copyright Renewal Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTE…

Blog

Recut, Reframe, Recycle

Pat Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi and their colleagues at American University's Center for Social Media have released a fantastic new study on creativity on the…

Blog

Defending The Lexicon

Yes, it's true.  As Zohar Efroni reported, the Fair Use Project has signed on as co-counsel representing RDR Books in its litigation against J.K. Rowling an…

Blog

Henry Jenkins on Moral Kombat

Henry Jenkins at M.I.T. put up an excellent post about Moral Kombat, one of the first films we reviewed as part of our then-new (now not-so-new but significantl…

Blog

Doing God's Work

Here is a very nice plug for CIS from one of the most respected and accomplished copyright lawyers around -- Bill Patry.  In it, he notes my recent article abou…

Blog

Why, Diddy? Why?

Music sampling has suffered a strange fate at the hands of copyright law.  It should fare well under the fair use doctrine.  In general, it's very transform…

Blog

Fair Use And Free Speech

All too often, copyright is viewed in strcitly economic terms, as if it does no more than determine who pays what to whom, and when.  In his editorial in today&…