In addition to the billions of dollars Calvin Klein, Nike, and Microsoft spend marketing their products, these companies blow considerable amounts of cash tracking down counterfeit goods that bear their high-priced brand names.
To help stem the tide of fake cosmetics, CDs, software, and other products, a British company called Flying Null has developed a technology that embeds invisible data tags to track materials wherever they go.
Flying Null's magnetic-sensing tags are read by a scanner, which can be as small as a cell phone. It reveals the product's origin and batch information. Made from a soft, magnetic alloy, the tags are about one millimeter long, and can be embedded inside plastic, paper, and other materials (though not metal) and detected at distances greater than 15 centimeters from the scanner.
"These are the magnetic equivalent to bar codes," said Dave Arnold, Flying Null's managing director. "People would like to be able to go into a store in a city and covertly check if a product on the shelf is authentic. With this, inspectors can pick up the product without removing it form its packaging."
Counterfeiters are making increasing use of high-tech tools, such as digital copiers, to reproduce and distribute brand-name goods. Advanced packaging technologies are one way the manufacturers are fighting back.
Since product distributors vary the price of their products for different markets around the world, Arnold said, the Flying Null tags could be used to verify that products are being sold at the correct market value. For instance, if a Gucci retailer in Tokyo was buying up Gucci products at New York outlets and reselling them at Tokyo prices, the tags would be able to identify the specific product and where it was originally distributed.
Besides tracking this sort of "gray market" diversion, other details about products can be obtained from a central database that is linked to the tags.
Flying Null is targeting high-risk industries like CDs, softwear, cigarettes, garments, and cosmetic goods, and ultimately, the tags could even find their way into currency, he said.
Peter Lowe, assistant director of the International Chamber of Commerce and Trade's Counterfeit Intelligence Bureau, called the tags "very interesting and a novel approach" compared to the existing anti-counterfeit technologies, such as holograms and watermarks.
