Recent blogs have focused on how deterrent technologies can be used to support the ecosystem required to provide strong brand protection and anti-counterfeiting. That ecosystem involves the PRACTICE mnemonic:

P is for Plan, R is for Research, A is for Activate, C is for Collecting data, T is for Training, I is for Investigate, C is for Convict, E is for Evolve.

This form of PRACTICE outlines an end-to-end process for initiating and supporting an anti-fraud program. Each of these—from Plan to Evolve—involves by itself multiple processes as well. Today’s blog focuses on two quite different types of processes, each focused on the “Investigate” portion of PRACTICE.

The “Investigate” portion includes the continual accumulation of data on the counterfeiting of your product. One means to do this uses security variable data printing, or SVDP. This is the use of multiple variable deterrents to draw out the “style” of the counterfeiter. That is, SVDP regions can be used as “bait” or “decoy” deterrents—not to force the counterfeiters to “replicate” the data in the printed region, but instead to force the counterfeiter, through trying to replicate the appearance of the printed region, to identify himself. This is because complex printed regions cannot be scanned and re-printed without modification. How a counterfeiter will try to reproduce such a complicated region—the choice of color, intensity, spatial frequency, contrast and other transforms the counterfeiter uses—provide a signature for the counterfeiter’s style. This process is an example of an a priori process, in which the data to be collected is designed and deployed.

Another means to continually accumulate data on the counterfeiting of your product is to perform a posteriori analysis of the product, and compare the analysis results to those expected of legitimate product. As a non-printing example, John Jasper, head of Molecular Isotope Technologies (MIT), writes, “Process patents are mechanisms by which to protect and extend the patent-protected lives of pharmaceutical products. They are typically supported by the analysis of reaction impurities, trace metals, etc. Natural stable isotopes present a novel source of information recording evidence of the process manufacturing history – particularly, the synthetic pathway – used to produce pharmaceutical and other chemical materials…[Our] work in the area of product authentication showed that every batch of pharmaceutical materials had a highly-specific ‘isotopic fingerprint,’ allowing individual batches of materials to be tracked and counterfeit batches to be identified.” In other words, MIT’s process for analyzing the reagents in a pharmaceutical are precise enough to disambiguate between the authentic and the counterfeit processes involved in production.

-Steve