Ten percent of global trade is impacted by product piracy, according to estimates by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in a study published in 2011. The total negative effect on the G20 economies, including lost tax revenues, prosecution costs and loss of investment, amounted to $125 billion in 2008 alone.

"Attacks on products and knowledge can take various forms, so companies need to tailor their protective measures to these different scenarios," warned Fraunhofer AISEC (Research Institution for Applied and Integrated Security) in a recent study on product protection. "Modern reverse-engineering methods make it possible to reconstruct the technology for innovative products, providing counterfeiters with sophisticated methods and tools for system analysis, product tampering and copying," explained Bartol Filipovic, one of the authors of the AISEC study. Still, the battle is not nearly as hopeless and costly as is often assumed, and a broad range of organizational, legal and technological protections are available. Companies can regulate access to expertise and to the product supply chain, legally protect and enforce their trademark rights and shield their IT and communication infrastructures from incursions.

The rising importance of cloud computing and mobile applications does not make protecting intellectual property in the digital workflow any easier. However, technology in this area is becoming more sophisticated.

Product protection is enhanced today through a variety of technical means, including RFID, holograms, VOID films, digital watermarks, micro color codes, data matrix codes or partially concealed multi-body co-simulation.

Digital rights management (DRM), originally conceived to protect audio and video files from counterfeiting, has evolved into enterprise rights management (ERM), where unauthorized users are prevented from reading, copying or transmitting ERM-protected emails or files.

New methods for technical product protection as well as ERM solutions are presented in Hannover at the Digital Factory trade show, among other venues. At Research & Technology and in the "Industrial IT" and "Identification, Tracking & Tracing" special exhibitions at Industrial Automation, IT security and product protection have a central role.