Legal Question in Intellectual Property in Michigan

Re: Threatening Emails

A copyright suit is valid when there exists (1) a valid copyright in a work of authorship; and (2) another work of authorship is made that is substantially similar to a work the rights to which are owned by the copyright holder.

You should contact your intellectual property attorney to review the emails, the original work claimed by the email author and the supposedly infringing work to determine if this is for real. You can find an intellectual property attorney by visiting the US Patent & Trademark Office's website and searching for registered patent attorneys; they generally either have a copyright practice themselves or work directly with other attorneys who have a copyright practice.

The patent practitioner search site is found at: https://oedci.uspto.gov/OEDCI/ . Enter your state's 2-letter code for a statewide listing of patent attorneys and agents (if you live in a large city, you can also enter the city's name, but don't do that for small towns; the search is very specific that way and if there is no patent professional who lives and/or works in that particular small town, you'll get a null result).

Note that this listing contains both patent ATTORNEYS and patent AGENTS (non-attorney patent professionals). An agent can only refer you to an attorney in this matter, however, since agents cannot practice law outside of the specific arena of patent prosecution work, and copyright infringement suits are a far cry from patent prosecution. The individual listing will tell you whether the person is an attorney or an agent.

Cease and desist demands can indeed sound like extortion, so the tone of the emails is actually meaningless in this context.

Good luck.

THE INFORMATION PRESENTED HERE IS GENERAL IN NATURE AND IS NOT INTENDED, NOR SHOULD IT BE CONSTRUED, AS LEGAL ADVICE. THIS POSTING DOES NOT CREATE ANY ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN US. FOR SPECIFIC ADVICE ABOUT YOUR PARTICULAR SITUATION, CONSULT YOUR ATTORNEY.