The same way that I wouldn't bother to fact-check a spam phone caller, why give any credence to this kind of thing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/index.htm
I wish I could find the original writeup from Blue Jeans, it was frickin' magnificent.
Over my 20 years in tech, I've seen a couple cases where someone installed something they shouldn't have and we got threatening emails from the companies who somehow caught wind.
It's always resulted on our side with a total corporate ban on using anything from that company, even things that are otherwise OK / open source.
For instance at a previous company I worked, Oracle came calling for "VirtualBox Tools" trying to charge us some asinine amount because like one user had it installed and they wanted us to pay seats for the entire company. This resulted in a swift and decisive total corporate ban on VirtualBox.
I've seen this at a couple companies and can't imagine we're alone in this. You're trading long-term business for short-term gains.
Piece of advice for the future: if you receive a message like this, and don’t want the sender to reach out to other people in your organization — acknowledge the message.
Even the rather small company I work with would have sent a reminder to everyone to not interact with these messages.
Does sending a personal LinkedIn message to a random employee even count as "contacting the company" in the eyes of the law?
My approach would be along the lines of "you prove to me exactly what font me supposedly used then we'll look into it".
Journalistic attention can be very helpful at getting companies to reform bad behaviour (at least temporarily)
Do these people have no actual work to do? Refer to legal if you really feel compelled, and just move on...