It feels like the recipient company did an awful lot of work in response to what was at best a fishing expedition. A serious complaint about licensing that demanded a real response would have been sent by post. It's not clear to me that scattershot LinkedIn messages deserve any response at all. The fact that the initial message lies about trying to contact him another way is another check in the "ignore this completely" column.

The same way that I wouldn't bother to fact-check a spam phone caller, why give any credence to this kind of thing?

I know how much fun it is to rag on lawyers, but this is pretty much exactly why companies have legal departments.

This should have been referred to the company’s legal department, who could have coordinated the response and/or investigation (if either were warranted), and then decided how to deal with something that sure looks a lot like invoice fraud.

This wasn’t a technical issue or a business issue; as soon as Monotype alleged a license violation, they made it a legal issue, and the lawyers should have been involved from that point on. It makes no sense for some random tech guy to be taking a meeting or handling the response on a licensing dispute.

This tactic is not surprising. Monotype has been bought by Palo Alto private equity firm HGGC in 2019. Since then they have been trying to corner the market.

They buy absolutely every independent type design company they can (actually they just buy the IP if possible). They likely own every typeface/foundry you can think of. They own myfonts.com too. Somewhere there is a long term business plan to leverage all that IP in future so i would watch out.

Personally will absolutely not touch anything from Monotype/HGGC. Solutions? Besides the obvious open source SIL licensed typefaces. There are bunch of smaller high quality type companies that stayed independent even though they for sure got offers from HGGC by now. Mostly swiss/european companies likes of Grilli type, Lineto, Dinamo, Klim type, Florian Karsten, Swiss typefaces… companies with often just few employees. I find it better and safer long term when licensing creative work from some real humans and not corporation that uses AI shakedowns to waste everyones time.

In 1999-2000, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) started something similar in my country (Paraguay) trying to fight "piracy", but with real teeth. They had access to judges and the whole law enforcement system. They targeted a company, they sent a polite letter requiring the company to grant them access to the company's full IT systems to "audit" them for piracy. This meant, of course, running some foreign software in company IT, and of course getting access to the whole company data. If you refused, they could get a court injunction in a matter of hours and they would forcefully enter the premises, with police, press, the works. Most companies had to comply. The main player behind this was a certain azure copilot company.

Granted, most companies here at the time had unlicensed software, but this tactic pissed me off so much, that I decided to begin to use Linux and try to use Free Software for all my computing needs. In May 2000 I ordered from the U.S. a boxed set of Red Hat Linux 6.2 Deluxe Edition (at an enormous expense, given currency exchange rates and shipping expenses to Paraguay). When it arrived, I installed it on my PC. The rest is history.

I still have a Windows partition but I just use it to test compatibility with MS Office documents required by my clients, some light gaming, and nothing else.

So I'm now a quarter-century Linux user thanks to these heavy-handed tactics.

I wonder if it’s possible to demand vendors send billing agreements before running an audit like this:

We’re reasonably sure your report is incorrect, and it doesn’t contain compelling evidence to back up its claims.

Our standard auditing fee for requests like this is $10,000, pre-paid to an escrow account and refundable if we find the use of an unlicensed font.

Or something. Not a lawyer.

Have to insert my regular rant that while I wholeheartedly support compensating font creators, pay-per-view licensing for fonts is ridiculous and must end. Offer manageable flat fees, more people will license. Continue this license policy and stuff like in this article, even more people will run to open fonts.

Allegations of copyright infringement where the person making the allegation hasn't done due diligence need to be illegal and subject to civil penalty. The penalties for actual copyright infringement can be so severe that we cannot allow all the copyright wolf-crying that happens.

This reminds me of the Blue Jeans Cable / Monster Cable shakedown nonsense.

https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/index.htm

I wish I could find the original writeup from Blue Jeans, it was frickin' magnificent.