Higbee & Associates - False copyright infringement claim - Santa Ana California

This lawyer sent my client a letter demanding $1,750 for use of their alleged client's photograph.

I emailed Shannon Quarles, Claims Resolution Specialist, and asked her to send me a copy of the copyright registration. (In the U.S., you can't sue anyone for copyright infringement if you don't have a copyright registration. You can get a copyright application expedited if you're willing to pay an extra $500, but otherwise you have ~6 month wait before you can sue anyone.)

She responded that her client had no copyright registration, but could still apply for one, if necessary. I responsed that the lack of a copyright registration meant I had no proof that their client actually owned the image in question, and I asked for proof. (Since there was no registration prior to any alleged infringement, their client, if entitled to anything, was only entitled to ACTUAL, not STATUTORY damages, and also not entitled to their legal fees.) I asked Quarles for recent licenses evidencing what the image was worth to prove actual damages.

I got an immediate response from Quarles, who probably sends the same invoice to every target, hoping no one will read it. It's a fake-looking generic document called "invoice" dated in May 2019 with the licensee's name redacted (blacked out so not readable) for 5 images @$350 each, for a total of $1,750.

I responded that apparently their demand was 5x what the image was worth, and I again asked for a negative proving their client owned the image in question.

I then did a reverse image search, and the only thing that came up was an image from almost 10 years ago --not from 5 months ago.  That means Quarles' claim that the image had been recently licensed was BS. Or if it had been licensed, the licensee wasn't actually displaying it anywhere on the internet, and why would anyone do that?

I then searched for the buildings whose names in the image file names listed in the fake-looking invoice. None of the 5 had a name even remotely similar to the actual building in the image in question, and none of them looked remotely similar to the building in the image in question.

So then I accused Quarles of sending me a fake invoice, and argued that her client had no valid claim. She then gave me "one last chance" to resolve the claim before she "escalated" it to Cody Donnell, Senior Claims Resolution Specialist. I responded that if this firm escalated this claim and sued my client based on these facts, I'd seek Rule 11 sanctions against the Higbee firm. I told her to stop pretending there was any claim to resolve.