Blinding Xerox's Eye

The Xerox Corp. has grown to wealth and prominence by making it relatively easy and inexpensive to copy almost anything. Yet for the past decade, researchers at the company's Webster, N.Y., laboratories have been trying to find a way to render documents invisible to the luminescent eye of a Xerox machine. That seemingly suicidal quest was prompted by a growing clamor from publishers of copyrighted material who are angry about unlawful pirating of their works--and by Government nervousness about dissidents leaking xerographic evidence of federal mischief to the public (read Jack Anderson).

Xerox now has finally come up with an anti-Xerox weapon: a combination of fluorescent dyes that can render a piece of paper uncopiable. The dyes, which can be sprayed on a document from an aerosol can, are invisible until hit by the powerful light of a Xerox machine. Then they fluoresce with a bright flash that makes the copy momentarily illegible. After copies of a document had been distributed to all those authorized to see it, the original and the copies could be sprayed with the dyes so that attempts to make additional, unauthorized copies would produce only blank paper.

Xerox has been granted patents in the U.S. and Britain for the process. But company officials clammed up when an abstract of the patent was published last month in an obscure technical newsletter--which, ironically, could probably profit from being made copy-proof. A Xerox spokesman insisted last week that the company had no firm plans to market the fluorescent foiler. Wall Street analysts who follow the company say that if the product is ever introduced, sales probably would be restricted to the Defense Department, and others who could demonstrate a compelling need. Company officials do note that the fluorescent dyes can thwart only genuine Xerox machines. But that would certainly cramp the style of any future Daniel Ellsbergs. Xerox accounts for fully 85% of office copier sales and leases, including most of the machines in the Pentagon.

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