Must I respond to a forwarded Settlement Demand Letter?

[FoodWriter]

Hi all,

First, thanks to Matthew for providing this great resource, Oscar for championing the legal aspect of these GI settlement demand letters, and to everyone on this forum for the informative posts. I just fell into the "GI rabbit hole" this past week, and the website, the videos, and this forum really helped educate me and bring everything into perspective.

I have a situation that I have not read about here in the forum...at least not that I could find. I publish a food blog and wrote an article in which I placed a stock photo that I downloaded from a trade association. I believe the trade association has a proper license for the photo that pre-dates the photographer's relationship with GI, and perhaps I can discuss that in a separate post at some point.

But the purpose of this post is this: I have not DIRECTLY received a GI demand letter. Rather, GI mistakenly associated my blog with a product manufacturer and sent them the demand letter. The manufacturer's legal department forwarded a copy of the demand letter by e-mail, copied GI, told GI there was no connection between my blog and the manufacturer, and asked that I respond to GI.

I replied to all saying I was in receipt of the e-mail and would follow-up with GI. The manufacturer thanked me, and I believe they are now out of the loop.

So what I have is a PDF copy of a demand letter addressed as follows:

Legal Department
[My Blog Name]
[Manufacturer's Address]
[Manufacturer's City, State, ZIP Code]

The letter is not addressed to my LLC's legal entity name or to my business address.

I had a short conversation on the phone with the GI rep that, of course, was cordial but unproductive.

So the question that I throw out to the collective wisdom of this forum community:

Do you think I need to respond in any way to GI when they've not mailed me a proper settlement demand letter, addressed to my business at my business address? I should point out that the name of my business is shown in the footer of every page on my blog, including the one they photocopied into their demand letter. And finding my business address is as simple as plugging my business name into Google.

Thoughts?

Regards,
FoodWriter

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

You will most likely get something in the mail at some point, I would do your homework and track that image down, if in fact it came from a trade association and they in fact gave you permission, and this was before it was licensed to Getty, you might be able to steer them toward the TA.. You might want to contact the association and see if they can assst in the matter as well..