Patent Application Number: 2009200139
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| Summary / Description | European Patent Application focusing on the physical design of a card reader capable of reading either or both a magnetic stripe or an IC |
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| Type of Prior Art | Issued Patents - US |
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| Country | Germany |
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| Patent/Application # | EP19910121579 / EP0492358A1 |
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| Kind Code | European Patent Office (E... - Publ. of Application with sear... - A1 |
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| Patentee Name | Benjamin Sherman / Tandem Computers Inc. |
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| Relevant Pages, Columns, or Lines | |
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| URL | http://www.freepatentsonline.co... |
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| Filing Date | December 17, 1991 |
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| Additional Information | |
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| Notes | This seems reasonable as a basis for obviousness argument (re the mechanism itself); I think the use in a gaming system (as opposed to some other system) is orthogonal to the mechanism. |
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Excerpt Although the IC card may eventually replace the magnetic strip card, a large installed base of magnetic strip cards will likely make such transition slow and expensive. [...] In accordance with the system and method of the present invention, the data read and write functions can be performed simultaneously on both the magnetic strip and the IC data storage media of a data card. [...] Although the terminal 1 is capable of operating on data cards 3 having both magnetic strip 7 and IC 5 storage media, it should be understood that the terminal 1 is also operable on a data card having only one of the two types of storage media. |
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Claims
A method of processing a user data card comprising: determining that a user data card comprising a non-compatible smart card has been entered into a card reader; obtaining a user identifier from a magnetic stripe of the user data card; and processing the user identifier to obtain data from a user record to enable further processing in respect of the user data card.
| Relevance | With the possible exception of the "determining" step, the claimed mechanism is a subset of that described or implied in the prior art, wherein the card reader can read either or both a stripe and/or an IC. Now presumably an incompatible IC is one that cannot be read by a particular reader. It seems reasonably obvious that if a card containing a magnetic stripe and an incompatible IC is inserted into the prior art reader, which can read either/both the stripe and/or the IC, that the IC would not be read but the user identifier would be retrieved from the magnetic stripe. I don't see any significant departure from that in the active "determining" action in the current application. |
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An interface module for a gaming system, the interface module arranged to be placed in data communication with a card reader and a user database storing user records, the interface module arranged to: determine that a user data card comprising a non-compatible smart card has been entered into a card reader; obtain a user identifier from a magnetic stripe of the user data card; and process the user identifier to obtain data from a user record associated with the identifier to enable further processing in respect of the user data card.
| Relevance | With the possible exception of the "determining" step, the claimed mechanism is a subset of that described or implied in the prior art, wherein the card reader can read either or both a stripe and/or an IC. Now presumably an incompatible IC is one that cannot be read by a particular reader. It seems reasonably obvious that if a card containing a magnetic stripe and an incompatible IC is inserted into the prior art reader, which can read either/both the stripe and/or the IC, that the IC would not be read but the user identifier would be retrieved from the magnetic stripe. I don't see any significant departure from that in the active "determining" action in the current application. |
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A gaming system comprising: a card reader; a user database storing user records; and an interface module arranged to: determine that a user data card comprising a non-compatible smart card has been entered into a card reader; obtain a user identifier from a magnetic stripe of the user data card; and process the user identifier to obtain data from a user record associated with the user identifier to enable further processing in respect of the user data card.
| Relevance | With the possible exception of the "determining" step, the claimed mechanism is a subset of that described or implied in the prior art, wherein the card reader can read either or both a stripe and/or an IC. Now presumably an incompatible IC is one that cannot be read by a particular reader. It seems reasonably obvious that if a card containing a magnetic stripe and an incompatible IC is inserted into the prior art reader, which can read either/both the stripe and/or the IC, that the IC would not be read but the user identifier would be retrieved from the magnetic stripe. I don't see any significant departure from that in the active "determining" action in the current application. |
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United States