ISO standards will tackle goods' counterfeiting and fraud

2009-04-02

Participants at the first meeting of ISO/PC 246 in Saint-Denis, France, March 2009

ISO has set up two new committees to develop standards respectively for tackling counterfeiting of material goods and fraud.

ISO/PC 246, Anti-counterfeiting tools, held its first meeting in March 2009 in Saint-Denis, France. ISO/TC 247, Fraud countermeasures and controls, has only just been approved and is expected to meet for the first time later this year.

ISO/PC 246 was established following a request from AFNOR (ISO member for France). According to the proposal, the last decade has 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. Therefore, not only do they distort competition, violate interests and intellectual property rights of legitimate producers, undermining fair trade and distorting tax revenues, but they also generate risk for consumers, users and the distribution chain. This is particularly dangerous for instance, when affecting medical or food products.

Today, there are hundreds of 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.

An ISO International Standard would increase market transparency regarding the reliability and robustness of authentication tools. It would help businesses to 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” says 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 United Kingdom and the USA. The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute participated as an observer.

The newly created ISO/TC 247 will complement the work of ISO/PC 246 by focusing on fraud. This initiative was proposed by ANSI, the ISO member for the USA, which will hold the Secretariat of the committee.

ISO Secretary-General Rob Steele commented: “Together, the standards produced by ISO/PC 246 and ISO/TC 247 will provide harmonized, consensus-based, reliable solutions to help prevent the loss of earnings and jobs by companies victims of fraud and counterfeiting, as well as protect consumers from inadequate and unsafe products. The creation of these project committees once more underlines ISO's capacity for developing practical tools to tackle contemporary international concerns.”