1) Why do manufacturers do this? Is it for their own internal warranty control / tracking, or is there a broader federal mandate motivating this?
2) The dots are only useful in after-the-fact analysis, correct? If I print something and then there's reason to suspect me they can print something, compare, and verify, but there's no mechanism to find the initial document and find the printer, correct?
That's the explanation I've heard given in the past, although I don't know if it's the official one given. The East German Stasi also used to mark typewriters so that they could tell who wrote subversive articles.
On the other hand, if they didn't put in a lot of effort to prevent the stupidest form of counterfeiting, then the stupidest form of counterfeiting would be the real problem.
I seriously doubt that this helps at all. If someone tried to print bank notes from Photoshop and fails, they'll just try some other graphics app. I'm pretty sure Gimp and many other apps will work just as well as Photoshop would have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation is also recognized in many photo-editing software packages like photoshop. not government mandated, but i'm sure the software companies get leaned on to support it.
Re 2: Supposedly the manufacturer is supposed to keep track of which printers go to which stores, and the stores are supposed to keep track of the credit card used to purchase the printers.
1) Why do manufacturers do this? Is it for their own internal warranty control / tracking, or is there a broader federal mandate motivating this?
2) The dots are only useful in after-the-fact analysis, correct? If I print something and then there's reason to suspect me they can print something, compare, and verify, but there's no mechanism to find the initial document and find the printer, correct?