Huey Lewis and the News FORE Vintage Vinyl LP Shrink NM COA LIGHT DETECTION
$
48
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Description
Huey Lewis And The News “FORE” PICTURE THIS First Pressing SHRINK Light Signatures Inc., a 5-year-old company based in Century City, Calif.,makes a system that records a product's fiber 'fingerprint' to help identify counterfeit goods.
'The technology is rooted in the law of nature that no two things that are natural are identical. That difference is measurable and is not able to be duplicated,' said Joseph DeLuna, Light Signatures' president and chief executive officer.
'What we've done with our technology is to come up with a way to measure that difference and record it,' DeLuna said.
On the new Huey Lewis album, for example, Light Signatures will include a postcard-sized slip of paper in each record jacket before it is sealed. Each of the cards will have been passed through a computer-generated beam of light that records fiber patterns in the paper.
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Each fiber pattern will be given a numeric code that is placed on the card, which record-buyers are asked to mail to Light Signatures for verification of the product's authenticity.
The company analyzed consumer attitudes toward counterfeiting through several focus groups and found that consumers were willing to participate in programs designed to stem the flow of bogus goods.
'They want to help,' DeLuna said. 'Consumers don't want to buy counterfeit products.'
A coded card placed by Light Signatures in an album by singer Pat Benatar in 1982 generated a 9 percent response. A similar showing from anticipated sales of Lewis's album could generate as many as 540,000 responses, DeLuna said.
'A sample this large clearly will cut into whatever counterfeiting is going on at the retail level,' he said.
The bogus records, when detected, are pulled from record bins and destroyed.
Record industry officials estimated at least 10 percent of records and tapes sold each year are counterfeit, costing artists and record companies as much as $300 million annually.
Light Signatures, now a subsidiary of Telecredit Inc. of Century City, was formed in 1982 and did its first work with Levi Strauss & Co., the San Francisco-based clothing maker.
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'The chances are slim to none that there have been a pair of counterfeit (Levi) jeans in the United States in the past two years,' said Joyce Bustinduy, a Levi Strauss spokeswoman.
Bustinduy said the Light Signatures system is part of an elaborate program used to detect bogus blue jeans before they are sold.
Counterfeiting has blossomed into a global business touching an estimated $11 billion to $20 billion worth of products each year, said Don Dekieffer, general counsel for the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, a 300-member group based in Washington, D.C.
Counterfeit products range from cassette tapes of hit records to bottles of well-known shampoo to birth control pills.
'We had a real counterfeiting problem with shampoo. The counterfeits had enormous bacteria counts,' Dekieffer said.
He said Light Signatures is one of about six companies nationwide to use high-technology to detect phony merchandise.
'Technology is part of the answer, but no matter how sophisticated the technology, you may not be able to stop someone from selling phony shirts on a downtown street corner,' he said.
DeLuna said his company, which posted sales of $900,000 last year and anticapted sales of at least $4 million this year, is planning to apply its technology next to
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