If you have bought Ferragamo shoes recently, fancy footwear was not all that came in the box. Inserted in the left shoe’s sole is a passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag. A transmitter-receiver known as an interrogator can send a signal to the tag and read its response. Only genuine Ferragamo shoes send back the correct one. The RFIDs are the Italian shoemaker’s latest weapon in its campaign to protect its brand from fakes. Last year alone, the company says, it took down tens of thousands of ads for fakes bearing its label from online auction sites, and recovered or revoked 140 domain names and websites which, it argued, infringed its copyright, most of them belonging to Chinese people or firms. It has long been known that counterfeiting and piracy (respectively the infringement of trademarks and copyright, together known as intellectual property, or IP) make up a vast global business. But a report published on April 18th by the OECD suggests that, despite the advent of such high-tech counter-measures, it is far bigger than previously thought. The last such survey by the club of 34 mostly rich countries was in 2008. Updated the next year with data from 2007, it put the value of cross-border trade in fakes at $250 billion, or 1.8% of the total for all goods. The latest report estimates that by 2013 those figures had risen to $461 billion, and 2.5%.
