Celebrities Certified With RFID

Filed in archive Implementation on November 16, 2006

Who can forget the famous electric guitarists in rock music history, Jimi Hendrix? He was a talented self taught musician who was known to play the right-handed fender Stratocaster guitar turned upside down but unfortunately met untimely death and left us all at a young age of 27.

His personal stuff, the famous guitar strap from the 1969 Newport Pop Festival and the wah wah foot pedal would be displayed on his birthday at the BB King's Blues Club but affixed with RFID tags. You must be wondering what RFID is doing here. How would you feel as a fan if you spend loads of money to get your favorite stars belongings and land up with something which never belonged to him or her? Over the years we have seen a number of fake items coming up for sale and in order to counter this RFID is being used.

All this is being done by RFID Ltd which hopes to end piracy in the multi billion dollar memorabilia industry. After this the company also has plans of authenticating signed movie production stills from Home Of The Brave which is Jessica Beil's latest movie. This is how it will work. The unique ID number of the tag would be maintained in a database which would include details such as appraised value, purchase date and details about the owner and the manufacturer. It would be difficult to hack them as the ID number would be encrypted. People owning the prized items would be receiving a password for accessing the database and they could see items owned by other people in the database and this would lead to the creation of secondary market for these memorabilia.

If this turns out to be a success then you even might see big auction houses authenticating their pieces of art with RFID.