Getting Ready for the New Standards Season
By Joe Naujokas, Naujokas & Associates
As I write this, it’s the dog days of summer, and standards activity level is low, so there is little standards news to write about. So here are a few thoughts on upcoming issues. Of course when you read this, summer will be over and the standards season will be starting all over again.
Card Durability will reach important milestones the next two months, the final report on the Xavier University card durability field testing will be completed, and WG1 will formally begin work on the card durability standard document. The latter is contingent on approval of the New Work Proposal by SC17 at the October 2004 meeting in Sydney. It will be interesting to see how the two different testing philosophies of the USA and France/Germany will merge. I am confident that a consensus will be reached.
Smart Card Interoperability work now starting up in ANSI and ISO may clash with the EMV specification. Its speculation right now, but I wonder what is going to happen when card issuers will have a choice between interoperability standard and the EMV specification. The retailers in the US have been working with NIST to ensure their needs are being considered in the NIST Specification. The USA Retailers may want to exert their new found independence from MasterCard and VISA directives. Since there is little interest in the USA to implement smart cards in the credit card world at this time, this issue does not seem important right now. But as smart card interoperability standards pick up steam, we may see some turf battles begin.
A 650 Oersted Mag Stripe standard is being proposed at the urging of an ICMA member. A proposal was submitted to establish a mag stripe standard for 650 Oersted as an annex to the existing Low Co Mag Stripe standard, ISO/IEC 7811-2. The majority of 650 Oersted mag stripe (sometimes called medium coercivity) is used globally in mag stripe door locks and in also in Japan for some financial applications. The product is now generally certified using the Low Co Standard, with self-designed modifications or extensions.
There is support for such a standard and I am confident that we can reach a consensus for a reasonable standard. The standard will be a mag stripe media standard (or annex to existing ISO/IEC 7811-2) without any encoding parameters (or changes to existing encoding parameters). The goal is to provide a media standard to be used in the supply chain, tape, card and device manufacturers and the end users of this product, namely innkeepers.
Tactile Identifier (TI) New Work Item Proposal has been presented by Japan to WG1 for consideration at the Sydney meeting. Now that CEN (European Committee for Standardization) has completed their work on TI, the agreement between ISO and CEN allows ISO to work on TI. Japan is proposing the “Kyoyo-hin” card that uses a “self mark” concept for TI (See CM May/June 2003). The self mark is a pattern of dots on the lower right hand corner of the card that are embossed during personalization.
Patents are getting to be an issue in standards again. Part of the problem is that the line between a “new and novel idea” and “prior art or obvious to those schooled in the art” is becoming more and more blurred. Standards committees cannot indulge themselves in patent issues because they do not have the resources to do so; besides, it’s the lawyers who decide in the end, not technologists.
Some numbers to think about, in 1998 alone, nearly 150,000 patents were awarded by the US Patent office. A quick check through a patent database reveals a total of 4,123 US patents related to ID and Credit Cards and the number is increasing by the rate of approximately 300 per year. It’s amazing how many new, novel and useful patents surround the card. Of course that’s why we like this industry. What do you think?