Product Piracy

Capital goods industry is imperilled by counterfeiting more than ever. Legal services are the preferred measure of companies facing this challenge. This article shows further possibilities how producing companies can protect themselves effectively against counterfeiting. There are many technological and organisational measures already available. Furthermore, innovative measures are being developed at the very moment. Considering this background it is necessary to inform affected companies about the manifold possibilities of preventing counterfeiting. Moreover it is essential to depict how a specific threat can be faced by combining stand alone measures to customised safety concepts.

Globalization of world trade leads to an increased scope and scale of product counterfeiting. More companies and industries are affected. Counterfeiters get more and more professional. German companies have to protect themselves better. Legal measures are not enough - comprehensive strategies that combine legal, management and technical measures are necessary to fight counterfeiting. The research project ProAuthent is focused on authentication and labelling technologies as one important step towards a integrated protection against counterfeiting.

Consumergoods but also technical products, pharmaceuticals etc. are increasingly counterfeid. Production and global sales are often controlled by organised crime. The local confiscation of counterfeits does not impress the fraudsters. Effective countermeasures must include the closure of their production facilities.

Business losses by industrial counterfeiting and product piracy are versatile and substantial. It is a matter of concern for any industry sector [1]. For capital goods manufacturers, almost two of three businesses have already been struck by piracy [2, 3]. Effective countermeasures are, however, not only an issue during product development and production, but require also special consideration in after sales life cycle phases. Thus, PiratPro (www.piratpro.de) aims at holistic concepts that integrate service processes and technical countermeasures into “copy-proof” product bundles.

Globally increasing imitation of products increases pressure on introducing protective concepts. Analyzing constraints such as the product and the distribution process and examining protective measures are the conditions for protecting effectively. A balance between technically achievable solutions and economically justifiable efforts is to be found. Therefore, a research project of the Institute of Integrated Production Hannover focuses on RFID based authenticity certificates in folded boxes for pharmaceutical products.

It is not possible to eliminate counterfeiting sustainably only by single and short-term measures. Particularly isolated legal measures fail because they have only late and short-term effects. An effective and sustainable anti-counterfeiting requires a process-oriented approach as well as an integrated protection system that combines legal, organizational, technological and political processes. To manage such an integrated system, a company has to implement a process oriented organization as well as a monitoring system.

Product piracy has risen to a serious problem for almost every OEM in the capital goods industry. Identifying the right counter-measures for creating and optimizing a holistic anti-counterfeiting-strategy helps to cope with these challenges. One of the most critical factors in developing such a strategy is establishing a cost/benefit ratio. A three-level selection concept helps choosing the right measures.

The German mechanical Engineering and plant construction industry has high potential risk for product piracy. The growing globalization leads to very complex and often non existing possibilities of law enforcements. Thus corporate demands are emerging for new strategies and methods against product piracy. This paper describes a concept for copy protection out of a systematic combination from an early technological implementation of controlled inter- and intraorganizational Know-how and sig-nal flows. Therefore operational and organizational aspects are reducing the risk of being copied. The described approach is not limited to the own company instead it will reconsider the whole value chain for a complete copy protection.

Whenever automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and humans work in a common environment, dangerous situations can emerge, especially if the human workers do not know or do not pay attention to the current activities of the automated vehicles. A complete emergency stop in all situations where a worker could interfere with a vehicles plan would not be a good solution due to the associated costs. In this article, we propose an approach which is based on a qualitative scene representation created from sensory input. By detecting actions in the scene, hypotheses about possible plans are generated. Taking into account possible future actions of workers, a risk assessment is performed. The behavior of an automated vehicle has to be changed only in those situations that exceed a certain risk threshold.

Today, intelligent cognitive systems are expected to provide the user at the machine with situation-dependent information in regard to the sequence of actions. The resulting requirements are analyzed in this paper and based on this, an information model is developed which is machine-oriented and computer-processable. With this information model not only the structural and functional aspects of the machine but also the actions of the user are described. By the situational extraction of relevant instructions according to the information model the machine user is supported in his decision making.