Fighting Fakes with Kodak Technology

By Adam Dewitz on July 28th, 2008

Forbes.com has published an article from its upcoming print edition on technology brand owners are using to stop counterfeiters. The article highlights Kodak’s Traceless System, a forensically invisible authentication technology, being used by sports trading-card company Donruss to provide collectors with authenticity:

“In some cases, we couldn’t even tell what was real and what was fake,” said Scott Prusha, spokesperson for Donruss. “There was clearly a problem.” Fans aren’t going to pay an extra $15 to $1,000 for a trading card if they aren’t confident the thing is real.

To squelch the pirates, Donruss this year embedded an invisible marker into its cards, a trace amount of a chemical made by Eastman Kodak. Anyone questioning the authenticity of a trading card can send it to Donruss to be scanned by a device that detects the chemical’s presence. The nature of the chemical is a secret. All the Kodak people would say is that it’s made of small inorganic particles.

Read the rest of Fighting Fakes at Forbes.com