ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,499,456, issued on Dec. 16, was assigned to NIKE Inc. (Beaverton, Ore.).
"Digital fingerprinting" was invented by Nader Rahimizad (Portland, Ore.), Christopher Andon (Portland, Ore.) and Hien Tommy Pham (Beaverton, Ore.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method of authenticating an article of clothing includes providing a machine-readable identifier on an exterior surface of an article of clothing, the machine-readable identifier includes a digitally printed image having a plurality of predefined discrete areas with one or more ciphers. The ciphers include at least one of a symbol, a color, or a geometric shape, and are representative of a...