If you are reading this, then you may have received a copyright infringement letter from Dana Andrew LeJune, Attorney at Law, who boasts of offices in Houston, Texas, and Asheville, North Carolina. We have received and reviewed these letters, and ultimately defended clients who were the recipients of such demands, where Dana LeJune and his law firm will seek thousands of dollars in exchange for a release of claims. Unfortunately, some people just pay whatever Dana Andrew LeJune demands of them, but others have successfully hired us to help avoid these lofty demands where we either negotiate a substantial discount for a resolution or fight the claims in a court of law.
If a Dana Andrew LeJune letter has hit your inbox or, even worse, you have been named in an actually filed lawsuit by Mr. LeJune’s law firm, then feel free to contact us about your specific matter. We are either licensed in the jurisdiction where the case has been brought or will be filed, we will pro hac in if necessary, or find proficient legal counsel in that particular geographic location to be of service to you. And we do not charge for initial consultations.
Dana LeJune’s law firm often represents photographers, such as David Oppenheimer and Performance Impressions, who believe that their content has been stolen and used without consent. Typically, letters will begin with a subject line indicating the belief that copyright infringement has occurred and that there have been violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Then, Dana Andrew LeJune will include the photographer’s work and cite to your website’s metadata as well as the specific locations on your website (or a social media network page) where the content was published without permission. These letters look like templates and are often repurposed depending on who may be the intended recipient.
You should not ignore a Dana Andrew LeJune copyright demand letter, but you should also not simply comply with the demands included therein, which sometimes ask that you tender an audited accounting of the revenue received by you attributable to the “lengthy use of the work” and tender to the law firm a sworn itemization of all uses of the work as well as any others of the photographer, such as Mr. Oppenheimer. If you do have a commercial general liability insurance carrier who may cover the claim, then you should inform that insurer and you are free to indicate that you feel comfortable with our law firm handling the matter on your behalf.
Typically, you should consider taking down all iterations of the works from URLs that you control. This does not serve as an admission of any guilt or liability; instead, it will likely assist in negotiating a pre-lawsuit resolution (assuming a lawsuit has not yet been filed against you). You also should either respond to Dana Andrew LeJune and indicate that you are in the process of hiring a lawyer by the stated deadline in the letter or, in the alternative, ensure that you have hired reputable legal counsel by that stated deadline and just have the lawyer reach out to LeJune’s law firm before the deadline passes. While it is not a deadline set by a court of law, you will want to avoid having an unnecessary lawsuit filed against you based on your simple failure to respond.