I have been using only licensed software for all my projects in my company. Out of the blue a software vendor sent me legal notice accusing of copyright infringement of one of their software. Vendor shared a MAC ID and my company email on it. Upon investigation, I found out that one of the employees had downloaded a pirated copy of the software on his personal laptop for learning. Due to a certain emergency I had to allow him to use company email on his personal laptop for a couple of hours to respond to an urgent email. The software vendor shared with me on phone that he had been tracking that MAC ID for a while but as there is no point going after Gmail email ID he was waiting for a corporate email to get association on the MAC ID. Now the vendor is accusing my company of copyright infringement even though the MAC ID does not belong to my company and insisting that I purchase the highly expensive software.
How do I object to this? Am I liable?
I already have firewalls installed to limit employees from any authorised downloads.
Also, can the vendor limit me from using their other software that I have licenses of?
