Dad (64M) is stealing my (34F) intelectual property and selling the products on facebook. He feels justified in his actions and is now requesting $1k/month to stop selling the items.

I run a fairly successful business making 3d printed products. So successful I offered to help my dad out whilst he was out of work, by setting him up with a couple of 3D printers and paying him to help us print up stock.

With in a month he decided he would by himself 6 more printers to "help with demand". Problem being, we were pretty much under control - we have over 30 printers of our own. I was just trying to help him earn some pocket money and keep him busy.

He had access to our onedrive so he could download the files he needed to print for the stock - thing is we would specifically place the files he needed into a folder1 for him. Turns out he has gone through all of our designs - over 1500 and stolen them all. He is now selling them on facebook market place, under cutting me by at least $5.

We don't sell on Facebook. We have a successful website and put an immense amount of work into marketing our products on social media.

The problem I have is more than just him selling our designs. Its the quality he providing, which is substandard. The designs are fairly unique to our company - so I feel like it will reflect badly on us.

I have spoken to him about it. Explained how it is unethical and that his moral compass is totally out of whack. I've explained that I literally spend all of my time designing and perfecting our products. They aren't made in two minutes.

However, he feels as though he is completely justified in what he is doing because we havent been giving him much work lately (yay, covid) and we are "ripping him off" with what we are paying him. We pay him $3.50/item. He sees us selling the items for $13.50 but he doesnt factor is the merchant fees we need to pay, the tax we put aside, marketing costs, the materials (filament, packaging, etc), time spent cleaning up the products - after breaking it down we are only really making about $5 on the items (not including the $3.50 we pay him for the stuff we get him to make - so its really $1.50 when we use him to help make up stock)

Now, he has decided that if we guarentee him $1000 worth of work a month he will stop selling our designs on facebook...

Im not really sure how to deal with the situation. Hes my dad and I want to help him out but I feel like i am being backed into a corner and held to ransom.

Tl;dr: Dad has stolen my intellectual property and is selling the products on facebook. I asked him to stop. He has refused unless we pay him $1000 a month.

Submitted September 24, 2020 at 03:54PM by unidentifiedtoss https://ift.tt/2EvCKbs