Workaround
You bring your patent pending magical stealth technology, I'll bring a can of spray paint.
Disney's Imagineers have dreamed up a scheme to fight counterfeiting with a form of stealth technology. In a patent application disclosed earlier this month, Disney researchers describe a process for creating merchandise with a material that resists scanning through light distortion. By mixing a light-scattering plastic into …
Although I wonder if the 3-D scanners are also scanning paint colours, in which case painting over it before scanning may not be the best solution - might make it a 2-step process, though...
Some can do this, but the kind your average nerd interested in knocking out bootleg toys will be using a cheap scanner that just uses a laser to create a point cloud with no colour information.
spray paint is too much material.
i would just use an old vacuum cleaner.... more precisely the filled-up DUST BIN of an old vacuum cleaner.
a very fine layer of dust will cover all their crap and is much thinner than paint... and much better when 3D scanning an object.
why do you think all detective stories use carbon dust or talcum powder/magnesium carbonate powder for scanning fingerprints?
So you use materials that cause a 3D scan to get (slightly) corrupted, essentially introducing 3D DRM.
Solution is to make multiple scans using different devices, compare the various scans, & discard the data that doesn't exist in all of them. You're left with a single scan data file that contains none of the corruptions, allowing you to print off the original with ease.
Anything you (in this case the fuckers at Disney) can do hackers can do quicker, cheaper, & ultimately better.
So good luck with your attempts at pseudo-3D-DRM, it'll get stripped & tossed aside like the useless cruft that you are.
You can just imagine the problems if they did introduce some sort of DRM to artifical hip joints etc - Hipsney Corp has decided to withdraw your version of Hipjoint (TM) and will 'deactivate' it via an OTA update in the next twenty one days. Sounds like a good starting point for a novel.
"Sounds like a good starting point for a novel."
Actually, a rock opera:
On the one hand a simple method for a company that designs and produces items to secure its designs and the jobs of its staff seems a very sensible, reasonable thing.
On the other hand, this sort of item is probably easy to copy because it's designed to be cheap to make and expensive to buy.
Yup, music and video all over again. Remove the artificial scarcity and see what people think it's really worth. If the brand name is not enough, maybe Disney will have to find a way of adding real value to a 1c piece of plastic. Put a bar code on her butt and enable the princess to access licensed content that is kid safe and not as creepy as some of the internet enabled spy toys we have seen so far. The plastic should be merely the gateway not the final product.
maybe Disney will have to find a way of adding real value to a 1c piece of plastic. Put a bar code on her butt and enable the princess to access licensed content that is kid safe and not as creepy as some of the internet enabled spy toys we have seen so far
As opposed to Disney Infinity, which they somehow managed to not make any money off of even with the entire universe of Disney, Marvel and Star Wars captive characters?
...they just get the original design from the sweat shop in China where they are made.
I had heard rumor this was how some of those counterfeit iPhones were made; the factory just makes a few spare runs of their own and sell them to their cronies rather than Apple.
Many years ago (I wish I could recall the title) I read the autobiography of a currency forger (a Brit).
He made himself *very* unpopular with the US treasury by rendering their multi-million pound anti-forgery measures useless.
One of them (and it was a while ago) involved some sort of optical jiggery-pokery which meant that trying to photograph a dollar bill properly was impossible. Somehow they made it so that if you had one bit in focus, other bits would be out of focus.
The forgers solution was to create a mosaic of 1x1mm photographs, each individually focused, and composited into a single usable image for a printing plate.
Interesting.
I know that a rather lot of image manipulation programs (*glares specifically at all the official variations of photoshop*) have code that specifically detects if you've loaded an image of currency and refuses to have anything to do with it. Makes for a hard time if you are *intentionally* doing shenanigans to make a overtly, obvious fake bill that wouldn't even pass the 'casual glance' test.
Anon for obvious reasons. :)
no need to worry about me buying knock off stuff, my girls prefer not to dress like big breasted anorexic princesses in frilly dresses.
Yeah, my collectibles would be Nendroid and GoodSmile productss anyway. Not that those are cheap either (maybe $100 a pop for each member of Ho-kago Tea Time).
Assuming the counterfeiters were trying to produce perfect copies of the original item. Unfortunately they're not trying to produce perfect copies so any measures designed to prevent that are a waste of time.
I *suppose* there might be a very small niche for authentic counterfeits - certain high value collectible items - but I don't see the material acting as a huge impediment. If someone has possession of the original they could just dust the thing in talc or similar, or just create a mould from the original and scan that. Nuisance value, nothing more.
Hmm... does this mean I can get a 'normal' shaped Elsa doll, preferably with a volume control on the incredibly annoying an repetitive singing 'feature'? If indeed it must preserve the singing, maybe it could learn a few more words of the one song it knows? My child isn't an idiot, and can learn more than 4 words in a song.
It's sort of a shame there isn't a (legal) market for alternative versions of 'official' products. We might actually have better role models and more accurate feedback for 'official' suppliers to consider.
I admit I can see the need on occasion to scan and then print a replacement part for something that broke, but usually the times that would have been handy is because I can't order a replacement part.
3D printing is changing the world, but counterfitting shouldn't be a worry unless the counterfit is better than the original! who would buy a counterfit engine part? and who wants a counterfit toy?
that is why piracy is rife with media, pirated copies are now better than official digital copies, they don't have DRM, they don't have limitations where you can play them, and the quality matches that of streaming/DRM downloads..
3D printing is changing the world, but counterfitting shouldn't be a worry unless the counterfit is better than the original! who would buy a counterfit engine part? and who wants a counterfit toy?
I dunno, my better half has a tendon condition and was showing me a video of a device that stretches the tendons to relieve pain, the device itself is pretty expensive for what it is (an ovoid bar with grips on each end), so I spent all of 4 minutes in Fusion360 designing a near enough exact copy, two hours 3D printing and she had one, I will stick the model on Thingiverse tonight so others can try it.
I actually had counterfeit Ninja Turtle toys as a kid, we used to go to the cattle market on the last Sunday of the month during the car boot sales and I would fill a carrier bag with bootleg toys fresh from some dudes garage for a couple of quid. The paint job was comical at best, but the molding was almost spot on, for £20 he would sell you a set of molds and you could knock out your own figures. Wish I bought one and kept it, would be a fun little keepsake.
...and who wants a counterfit toy?
There are thousands upon thousands of cheap knock-offs out there. Kids don't care and sellers are happy to save a few bucks and parents just want their kids to be happy. There is definitely a market. A bigger problem for Disney is that so much of what they do is copied from other sources. Anyone can make a Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, et cetera movie, toys, books and so on. Perhaps the Haus of Maus ought to come up with more original content rather than recycling stories they have already covered.
There's an entire TV programme dedicated to this stuff - Fake Britain with Mat Alwright (or some such name). Given a cheap copy of a Disney toy, designer watch etc and there will be a market. Often dangerous to kids. We used to wind up a friend because he'd spent all that money on a genuine Rolex telling him that he could have got an identical one we'd seen when we on holiday, for under a fiver. Why anyone would be stupid enough to buy their kids a knock-off knowing that it won't come close to safety standards is another issue.
"The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that value of global trade in counterfeit goods related to information and communication technology (ICT) was about $143bn in 2013."
The article is about the scanning and copying of physical objects, presumably mainly meaning things like plastic toys. How exactly are counterfeit ICT goods, meaning things like pirating software and DVDs, related to this? I'm pretty sure the market for counterfeit physical goods is much larger.
Remember when they had stuff they really didn't want you to photocopy they'd print it in black on red or something? Because colour copiers and even scanners were not generally available. This 3D printing DRM seems about as stupid as that. It may annoy a few people at home trying to make a copy or two for their own use. It will have zero impact on the serious counterfeiters who know what they're doing and who will trivially work around this.
More to the point, as far as I can see the wide availability of cheap photocopiers has still not killed off the printing industry; ebooks are having more of an impact. The nearest equivalent for toys I can think of is VR headsets so maybe Disney should be concentrating on VR games featuring their characters. Kingdom Hearts III VR anyone?
Pretty much all copy protection is defeated eventually and the people most likely to be affected by it are the everyday people who, if they can't get it free or cheap;y or make their own backups, will pay for a pirate copy at the car boot. It's the organised counterfeiters who make big money from large copying runs who have the most incentive to break copy protections mechanisms and they are more likely to be connected to organised crime. Or, gasp, terrists!!!!!!111!!1!!1!
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