About ten years ago I was working for a company that was featured in a (fairly glowing) article in the NYT. We linked to it from our media page, and a month or two later received a similar letter from their legal department instructing us to either remove the link, or pay them some outrageous amount of money (something like $4500, if I recall correctly). So we changed the link to an "I'm feeling lucky" search on Google that took you directly to the article. Never heard about it again.