[LINK] Not a good week to shop in Beijing

[Tom Worthington]

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012, at 02:45 PM, Nicholas English wrote:

> The Economist:  Free Exchange - Fakes and status in China
> http://www.economist.com/node/21557317

Brands are applied to goods in the factory, usually at the end of the 
production process. An alternative would be to apply the brand to the 
goods "Just in Time", in the store.

So you would go into a store and select a product. You would then scan a 
unique code embedded in the product to check if it was made in a 
licensed factory. You could then check what brands were available for 
this product and if this was a licensed outlet (with the store location 
verified by GPS).

After paying the brand owner on-line, a cryptographically protected 
digital label would be transmitted to the store and be embedded in a 
machine readable label, which would be applied to the product. The 
purchaser could verify this was genuine by scanning the label and check 
it matched the product code (the labels would be unique to each item).

Brands could be enforced at upmarket venues: as you entered a club or 
restaurant, the labels on your car, clothes and accessories would be 
scanned and checked to see they are genuine. At very upmarket locations, 
the maître d'hôtel would be empowered to ceremonially rip of fake 
labels, before ejecting you from the premises.  ;-)


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/