ISO to Develop Standards for Material Goods Counterfeiting, Fraud
April 9, 2009 // Published as a news service by IHS
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) set up two committees to develop standards for tackling counterfeiting of material goods and fraud.
ISO/PC 246 - Anti-counterfeiting tools, held its first meeting in March 2009 in France. ISO/TC 247 - Fraud countermeasures and controls is expected to meet later this year.
ISO/PC 246 was established following a request from Association française de Normalisation, the ISO member for France. According to the proposal, the last decade experienced a "boom" in counterfeited products, which is no longer limited to luxury goods and currently estimated to represent up to 10% of world trade.
Counterfeited products do not offer the same guarantees in terms of safety and/or compliance with environmental measures and regulatory requirements, according to ISO.
Therefore, not only do they distort competition, violate interests and intellectual property (IP) rights of legitimate producers, which undermines trade and distorting tax revenues, but they also generate risk for consumers, users and the distribution chain. This is dangerous for instance, when affecting medical or food products, ISO experts said.
Today, there are many devices and systems that can be used to authenticate genuine products, but there is no global standard available to help compare the different systems, establish performance criteria or ensure interoperability, according to ISO.
An ISO standard would help increase market transparency regarding the reliability and robustness of authentication tools, experts said.
It would help businesses make an informed choice when selecting the best tools for establishing the authenticity of a product. The standard would also help vendors of anti-counterfeiting systems, whether simple or complex, to improve the solutions they offer.
"Specifying performance criteria of authentication devices is crucial at both national and international level, to nurture greater confidence among consumers, empower and secure the distribution circuits and help public authorities deploy preventive and punitive measures," said Jean-Michel Loubry, chair of ISO/PC 246.
The future standard, ISO 12931 - Performance criteria for authentication tools for anti-counterfeiting in the field of material goods, will be applicable to all material products.
Among the issues to be addressed are:
- Criteria for data processing.
- Interoperability of anti-counterfeiting systems.
- Capacity to facilitate controls.
- Authorization of data access, reliability and efficiency to detect counterfeited products, as well as security including tracking.
The standard will look at the entire life cycle of a product to facilitate integration of anti-counterfeiting concepts in product design.
The first meeting of ISO/PC 246 was attended by ISO members representing Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. The U.N. Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute participated as an observer.
Source: International Organization for Standardization (ISO).