Determination Of Product Authenticity Using The IlluminatIR Infrared Microprobe

Intellectual property in the form of copyrights, patents, and trademarks promote cultural development, foster innovation and growth and protect public health and safety. Theft of these goods results in substantial economic, social and developmental costs that have increased exponentially in recent years. Theft is also shown to decrease employment opportunities, diminish tax revenues for governments and reduce incentives to invest. The growth in intellectual property rights violations was fueled in part by the spread of enabling technology allowing for simple and lowcost duplication of copyrighted products, as well as by the rise in organized crime groups that smuggle and distribute counterfeit merchandise for profit. Global access to the internet also plays a critical role, especially in regard to accessibility to counterfeit pharmaceuticals. The internet has become the primary tool for criminal organizations to advertise, communicate and conduct sales of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, as well as being the primary mechanism for consumers to find, order and make payments for counterfeit pharmaceuticals.

Defense of intellectual property assumes it is possible to differentiate an authentic article from a counterfeit one. Frequently this is a relatively simple task. As counterfeiters become more experienced in their trade, though, differentiation becomes more and more challenging. In many instances, it is necessary to perform chemical analysis before a conclusion about authenticity can be made. The IlluminatIR Infrared Microprobe is ideally suited to perform this chemical analysis, enabling a rapid, reliable and non-destructive evaluation of the sample, i.e., within minutes an accurate conclusion as to a sample's authenticity can be made. In this report a simple method to determine sample authenticity is proposed.