Patent and product piracy

Abstract

Advanced industrial countries are affected by technology theft. German industry annually loses more than 50 billion euros. The main causes are industrial espionage and fraudulent copying patents and industrial products. Many Asian countries are profiteering saving up to 65% of production costs. Most affected are small medium enterprises, who do not have sufficient economic power to assert themselves against some powerful countries. International organizations, such as Interpol and World Customs Organization - WCO - work together to combat international economic crime. Several methods of protection can be achieved by registering patents or specific technical methods for recognition of product originality. They have developed more suitable protection, like Hologram, magnetic stripe, barcode, CE marking, digital watermarks, DNA or Nano-technologies, security labels, radio frequency identification, micro color codes, matrix code, cryptographic encodings. The automotive industry has developed the method “Manufactures against Product Piracy”. A sticker on the package features original products and it uses a Data Matrix verifiable barcode. The code can be recorded with a smartphone camera. The smartphone is connected via Internet to a database, where the identification numbers of the original parts are stored.