Documented authentication as an effective protection against counter-feiting for components in mechanical engineering

Germany's mechanical engineering companies are well-known and globally appreciated for the high quality and functionality of their products. On one hand, this reputation offers itself as a basis for economic success, but on the other hand attracts copyists and counterfeiters, who will readily accept to profit from this development effort by selling counterfeit components and spare parts. For this reason, beside legal und organizational measures there is also a need for technical concepts for anticounter-feiting. Thus six companies and the Technische Universität München have decided to fight product piracy together and develop an effective protection system. Essentially two approaches for discovering imitations and fakes and thus fighting product piracy exist in today's logistics and trademark protection: The first approach is the application of tracking and tracing functions, which are based on databases which store information about the serialized product's progress through the logistics chain. The second possibility aims at marking original components with fraud resistant features and the manual control on location.