Hitachi, Oracle jointly fight piracy in China
04 Jun 2007
Japanese electronics group Hitachi and U.S. software firm Oracle Corp. plan to jointly market wireless tags that help to identify counterfeit goods in China, the Nikkei business daily said on Sunday.
Hitachi and Oracle will market the IC, or integrated circuit, tags for a wide range of products, including cash vouchers, luxury items and home appliances, the Nikkei said. IC tags are tiny chips that can store basic information about a product such as where it was produced and by which company.
A reader can be used to retrieve that information and verify the authenticity of the product.
The tags will be made by Hitachi and cost about 10 yen ($0.08) each. Initially Hitachi and Oracle will sell the tags for use in tickets for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.
The tags would be embedded in the tickets and be used to prevent the use of fake ones the report in Nikkei said.
Piracy
of branded and copyright goods has been a source of
trade friction between China and several of its trade
partners, and the Chinese government is taking steps
to crack down on counterfeiting and protect intellectual
property rights.
