- Don't sue yet.
- A lawyer will probably charge around $500 for an official-seeming "demand and request to cure" letter. This is your next step. You shouldn't need to pay a retainer fee for this.
- If they don't respond to the letter, or don't address the issue in a satisfactory way, then your next move is to sue them, if you feel you must. In your complaint, you'll reference all communications you sent them previously. You can sue in your home state, as that's where you're located and Facebook evidently does business there. This is going to be expensive; your business cannot represent itself in court, so you must hire a lawyer. If you see it all the way through to trial, an uncomplicated state court case will cost, on average, somewhere in the low six figures in attorney fees; Federal cases are twice as expensive -- probably around $400k on the low end.
There's stories of people just writing their own official sounding letters and getting action. Pleading and crying, even over clearly illegal things like revenge porn often gets ignored.
Can confirm. You don't need a lawyer just to write an official sounding letter. Patio11 (Patrick Mackenzie?) has a blog post somewhere about how to write one. In short, avoid emotional or threatening language, write like it's nothing personal, use words like "require" rather than "demand", set a deadline for a reply, and don't say what happens if it's not met. That should scare anybody who reads it into sending it up the chain. Regardless of that, your audience is not just the recipient but the judge to whom you'll show the letter to prove you did everything you could to resolve the matter before going to court.
I used this technique to good effect in what would have been a clear case of tortious interference because of someone posting false and misleading information about a business. IANAL but I'm not convinced facebook has done anything illegal to the OP.
I wonder how LLMs are going to change the cost of these activities as they become more accurate & capable. Feels like the costs should come down dramatically in the next few years.
I predict an arms race between people using LLMs to sue and courthouses using LLMs to keep up with the increasing burden of responding to all the incoming cases. Which means people with access to better, more expensive LLMs will have the advantage.
They've already brought it down. As with software, prices don't go down though. It's just that less people get hired to do what was once double the work.