Is your Intellectual Property Protected Against Counterfeiting?

Product piracy is becoming an increasingly bigger problem for many industrial companies as they are not protecting their intellectual property well enough and criminals are seeing the profits to be gained. “Criminals are increasingly turning towards counterfeiting from other crimes because the profits are better and the jail terms are shorter,” explained Ian Blackman, technical manager at the International Institute of Obsolescence Management (IIOM) in an article for Eureka Magazine.

A counterfeit product cannot live up to the same expectations as a real product. When it fails, the consequences can be severe. A loss of image, customers and profits are just the start for the manufacturers who have suffered at the hands of being copied. Above all else though, the safety risks for the consumers are extreme for example think of a car with cheap, low quality brake pads. This makes tackling the problem of product piracy a top priority for many component manufacturers.

Many companies try to protect themselves by offering no digital product data, but offering your Intellectual Property online is only a risk when all of your manufacturing data with feature control symbols and tolerance levels along with all confidential data is available for anyone to download. However, on the other hand many manufacturers are going to the other extreme of not sharing information. They may for example provide only simple 3D contour models that just show the surface of a product. This is a very overcautious approach, as engineers need to see design specifications before they are willing to integrate components into their designs. This means that these companies are preventing themselves from reaching their full sales potential.

The best solution is in the middle says the Goldilocks principle. According to the British fairytale when the young Goldilocks gets lost in the woods and stumbles across a house with three bowls of porridge she finds one too hot, the other too cold, but the bowl in the middle is just the right temperature. “We only show enough information to be useful, but not enough to be copied,” explains Jürgen Heimbach, CEO of CADENAS. “Our 3D CAD models in our Electronic Product Catalogs give the engineers and designers all the information they need to make a qualified decision about which components to choose. Materials, kinematics, mounting geometry are just some of the available information that cannot be seen in 3D contour models but are still needed by engineers.”

Engineers are satisfied and receive all the necessary data with an eCATALOGsolutions manufacturing catalog, but what about the manufacturer’s intellectual property (IP)? “We don’t share any important IP information in the model. The manufacturers’ IP is our top priority, along with getting the engineers the information they need. Before any content is put on our site it is approved and certified by the manufacturer,” explains Colin Johnson, CADENAS UK in an exclusive interview with Eureka Magazine. To read more on the theme of counterfeiting go to www.eurekamagazine.co.uk