[ianferrel]

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?

[wavemode]

The author explains this - initially, responding to the Mootype rep was not really given much thought or concern, for the same reasons you point out.

But then the rep started emailing EVERYONE, until eventually someone's manager started to panic about it. And when managers start to panic, it becomes everyone's problem.

So really this ended up being simply a successful scare tactic by Monotype.

[stephen_g]

But when it turns out to be a basically fraudulent report, now they suffer reputational damage both internally to this company (who I expect would now instruct any design agencies they use to not use any Monotype fonts in their projects), and now externally as this is reported on! So the 'scare tactic' might have been successful but the overall exercise actually seems pretty damaging to Monotype all in all...

[nacozarina]

I always assumed ppl deleted this sort of spam. It was kind of interesting to hear what happens if you indulge it.

[Hnaomyiph]

I agree. Reading through this seems like a long winded way of putting off telling some random person on LinkedIn to bugger off. If there’s a supposed licensing issue, send a legal letter, not a LinkedIn message. Big waste of time for everyone involved

[throw5t4ery]

If you continue reading, you will find out that’s what the author did.

It was a new employee in the company who was eventually tricked to respond, and that’s why the author had to get involved again.