Comments on: Custom stamps push the envelope

As part of an "integrity test" of a new custom-stamp service, The Smoking Gun orders postage depicting some nefarious characters.

[Crunchy Doodle]

Pictures on Postage

I have a sheet of 37 cent stamps on order with a nice picture of one of my granddaughters. My family will get a big kick out of it.

And so what if someone had a sheet of stamps made with Linda Tripp or Monica Lewinsky in her blue dress, or any of the others cited. I didn't see anything that was pornography. All I saw was inflammatory sensationalism. Bad taste and stupidity are not a crime.

[C.Schroeder]

Induce Act target

If the Induce Act is passed as-is, kiss this service goodbye, because Stamps.com will have no way to reliably screen out all misuse of copyrighted images. Thanks to previous tinkerings to copyright law by Congress, a work not registered and marked as copyrighted is still protected under copyright law.

Bad journalism, reporting on reporting...

All I see here is a story about recognizable and widely despised stamps being rejected. The big story is that they mailed a stamp with a hardly recognizeable picuture of Ted Kazinski taken 30 or 40 years ago?

Unless you're a hardcore Unabomber fanatic, you're just not going to recognize the picture. And while Milosovich is slime, he's certainly not a familiar face to the vast majority of Americans.

The point of the screening program isn't to stop some people from being offended. Stamps.com is never going to know that receiving a picture of your Aunt Tilly who always hated you and thought you were a communist is going to be offensive to you. The point is to prevent widely offensive, recognizeable images going on stamps. Hitler, aborted fetuses, porn, would be prime examples of this.

This kind of junk journalism is what I expect from the tabloid shock-jocks over at TheSmokingGun.com But news.com repeating this crap calls into question the entire reputation of CNET.