As always, the solution is to contact their legal department, preferably via a lawyer. Engineers and support staff are not going to risk their jobs making legal decisions about giving away company property.
The FSF could help a lot here by publishing demand letter templates outlining the statutory and precedential basis for license enforcement and recovery of damages.
But it's the company's legal department which would evaluate that claim. Because it's a legal claim. Licenses aren't magic spells, they're social agreements and non-executive employees don't want to get in trouble for making executive decisions.
That really depends. A company can still own the copyright to the code that they’ve written, even if it’s licensed with GPL. It’s an asset that is transferred if the company is sold, etc, so yes, it’s actually company property.
The GPL grants rights to use and distribute, but does not grant ownership. It’s not suddenly in the public domain.
Yeah there are are startups where head guys don’t know that and developers jump the gun because they feel like they’re ones that have the best understanding of the issue at hand.
I agree that a front-line CSR or even engineer is not likely the right person, but surely then the responsible action is to redirect the request to the responsible department or person?
Absolutely, and companies that routinely get requests like this train customer service agents on specific trigger words like "license" or "GDPR" that must be redirected. Without that training, it's not obvious why "it's GPLv2 licensed" is more compelling than the last customer's argument that the device warranty obligates you to drop everything and immediately fix the minor UI bug they reported.
The FSF could help a lot here by publishing demand letter templates outlining the statutory and precedential basis for license enforcement and recovery of damages.