It's true. Canon did indeed create such a chip. It's the same chip that's used in vending machines to scan dollar bills. They built a prototype copier which prevented copying money, but I don't know if they actually decided to install the chip in all their assembly-line production copiers or not tho.
Nope. There is no "chip" that scans dollar bills. Dollar bill scanning is based on the magnetic ink in a few simple stripes, the presence (actually, absence) of UV fluorescent inks, and not on optical recognition per se, and besides, we all know how "reliable" such machines are. NOT! Besides, even if a pattern-match chip existed that could do it fast enough, simply turning the bill a few degrees (say, 45 degrees, across the glass) would render the problem intractable... And how about adding a background of stripes... something to really confuse the chip.... Sorry, no. -Bill