this may seem like harmless fun and a part of our holiday experience, it is a very serious matter that is the tip of the iceberg of a problem significantly impacting world trade. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that 8-10% of all world trade is in counterfeited goods. The US Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile, reckons that counterfeiting costs $200bn per year in lost business to American companies. It is also in far more areas than just the consumer goods outlined above. The World Health Organisation estimates that the annual value of counterfeited drugs sales is $40bn, while the FAA estimates that 2% of the 26m airline parts installed each year are counterfeit.

What has this got to do with the printing industry? A lot. With today’s technologies in digital imaging, editing and printing, it is very easy for counterfeiting organisations to have equivalent capabilities to those companies creating the printed work used in the legally correct products. It is easy to create accurate facsimiles of original printed material unless specialized substrates or printing approaches are used.

Tackling the problem
Several kit manufacturers, though, are tackling the problem head-on, not least Xerox and Kodak. Both are running initiatives to produce printed material that is difficult or hopefully impossible to counterfeit.


Xerox has introduced an application called Glossmarks with many of the production level digital colour presses. It allows hidden images and text to be printed in a document which can be viewed only from specific angles, and which would be difficult to replicate without having the same production equipment and software. In addition, it
allows for text to be printed within a document that can only be viewed under an infrared or ultra-violet light. These texts do not require special toners and are printed using the standard CMYK sets of the machines.

Glossmarks also allows for printing of microtext which, to the naked eye, looks like a black horizontal line but can be read with a magnifying lens, and the embedding of hidden text or images in a printed piece that can only be viewed through a specific filter created at the same time as the printed piece. The use of all these technologies can be combined in a single printed item to provide a high level of security.

Real potential
Kodak’s development, called Traceless, has some of the capabilities of Glossmarks, in particular microtext but, in my view, it is going much further. It can be used with conventional and digital printing, but also in production of products away from the printing world. It puts a marker, made up of tiny particles of material, into inks, varnishes, paper pulp and woven fibres, toners, moulded or extruded plastics, textiles, pigments or paints.

These markers have no effect upon the characteristics of the host material and can only be identified by a matching reader supplied by Kodak, which believes these markers could be put into food or pharmaceuticals. The applications for Traceless are varied: for instance, pharmaceutical labels and folding cartons, cosmetic packaging, thermal bar code labels and thermal prints, extruded fibres, coated fibres and textiles and electrophotographic and inkjet prints.

To implement Traceless, Kodak would have to negotiate long-term licences to both product manufacturers and printers, and set up strict security procedures for those companies. In my view, the opportunity for printers to work with Kodak as Traceless-approved organisations is huge. It ap-pears to offer both printers and product manufacturers a way to counter the growth of counterfeiting. This may be the real ‘killer application’ for the new Kodak in the digital world.

Andrew Tribute is a journalist and consultant in digital pre-press and pre-media marketing technology. Visit: www.attributes.co.uk