Thursday, September 8, 2011
Visa recently said it will attempt to jump start contactless payments in the United States by incentivizing merchants to put in new POS devices that accept Europay/MasterCard/Visa (EMV) cards – the credit card standard in Europe and much of the rest of the world.
EMV cards use microchips instead of magnetic stripes to store cardholder information and transmit this information to the POS. The EMV transaction can be initiated with either a card swipe or near field communication-equipped device. Analysts have told The Green Sheet they believe MasterCard will soon also offer incentives to adopt EMV in the United States.
SmartMetric is currently appealing a decision in a Markman hearing held in the U.S. Central District of California. A Markman hearing, also known as a claim construction hearing, is a pretrial hearing where a judge rules on the meaning of key words in a patent infringement case. SmartMetric has repeatedly said in public it believes the court unfairly narrowed its patent with a "wrongful and inaccurate interpretation" of key words in its patent.
"SmartMetric asserts with great confidence that the Court's construction of meaning is fundamentally wrong and flawed and that the court has made a substantial error that SmartMetric Inc. is confident will be overturned in a higher court," the company said in a June 2011 news release.
In the same release SmartMetric noted it is still free to sue "patent infringers who fall within the court's own interpretation of the patent, namely the use of 'contact' cards to make a connection to a network."
A SmartMetric spokesman told The Green Sheet its suit against Visa and MasterCard would be filed in early September 2011. In a U.S. Security and Exchange filing shortly after the Markman decision SmartMetric noted, "While the company is confident that the [Markman] judgment in the Visa and MasterCard case … will be overturned on appeal, the results of any litigation [are] inherently uncertain, and there can be no assurance that we will prevail in the appeal of the litigation matters. We plan to pursue our claims and defenses vigorously and expect that the litigation matter … will be protracted."
The Green Sheet Inc. is now a proud affiliate of Bankcard Life, a premier community that provides industry-leading training and resources for payment professionals. Click here for more information.
Notice to readers: These are archived articles. Contact names or information may be out of date. We regret any inconvenience.
