Artists, Galleries, Collectors, and Resellers Will Be Able to Leverage No-Touch Serialization Technology to Preserve and Protect Artists’ Creations and Legacy

BELLEVUE, Wash., Feb. 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The Art Legacy Institute (ALI), a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting artistic legacy through education, provenance development, research, and the advancement of technological solutions, today announced a partnership with Alitheon, the global leader in no-touch serialization. ALI will use Alitheon’s FeaturePrint technology to establish irrefutable provenance and artwork identification, providing accessible no-touch means to protect artistic legacy from fraud, misattribution, and theft.

Be it individual one-of-one works of art, or multiples in the form of prints, sculpture, and photography, the art market currently relies heavily on the very subjective eye of individual market experts, or on additive proxies such as certificates, stamps, or markers to verify authenticity and provenance. This makes it an attractive and easy target for fraud, theft, and illicit trafficking. Traditional authentication methods, such as marking and labeling, give fraudsters opportunities to replicate both the authentication proxies and the artwork itself.

In response to increasing global trends in art crime, the FBI established the Art Crime Team in 2004. It has since recovered more than 20,000 art pieces valued at over $1 billion and has prevented several billion in fakes from entering the market. A founding member of that team, now retired FBI agent Ronnie Walker, set up the Art Legacy Institute to provide artists and other stakeholders, an irrefutable means of protecting their art to preempt and avoid the very crimes he helped solve while at the FBI.

“The barrier to entry for art fraud has significantly decreased, thanks to accessible printing technologies capable of producing nearly identical replicas of artwork, even mimicking brushstrokes,” said Ronnie Walker, president of ALI. “The global art market has been searching for innovative solutions to stop art fraud in its tracks. Using FeaturePrint eliminates the need for additive markers, while addressing conservation concerns, maintaining the artist’s original vision for the artwork, and enabling straightforward and scalable implementation.”

Alitheon’s FeaturePrint technology uses its advanced machine vision algorithms to convert various minute details of a physical item into a unique digital fingerprint that can later be used to irrefutably identify that very item.

“Until now, there hasn’t been a clear way to definitively, simply, and objectively protect artists’ work and reputation. FeaturePrint has the power to revolutionize how artwork is identified and traced by enabling provenance that begins with the artist.,” said Roei Ganzarski, CEO of Alitheon. “ALI’s founding team has unmatched experience and expertise in the world of art fraud. We are excited and proud to be working with them to solve this growing global problem and provide value to the artists.” 

About Art Legacy Institute

Art Legacy Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the mission of protecting artistic legacy through education, provenance development, research, and the advancement of technological solutions to protect artistic legacy for art and cultural property. Art Legacy Institute strives to make available the knowledge and tools essential to document, preserve, protect, and promote artists’ creative contributions, thereby ensuring their impact endures for generations to come. 

About Alitheon

Alitheon® is the leader in advanced optical AI and creator of FeaturePrint®, a patented system connecting the physical and digital worlds via a secure and immutable link. FeaturePrint digitizes for items and products, what fingerprints are for people – a unique identifier that doesn’t require marking, modifying or adding anything to the item. Using just a camera, FeaturePrinting enables authentication, identification and traceability of individual items out of millions of similar objects, avoiding counterfeits, eliminating parts’ misidentification and minimizing the use of wrong products. FeaturePrint is currently used for numerous trace and authentication purposes across automotive, pharmaceuticals, aerospace and defense, medical equipment, precious metals, and luxury goods and collectibles.

Media Contacts:

media@alitheon.com

media@artlegacyinstitute.org 

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SOURCE Alitheon