Custom stamps push the envelope

Would you lick Slobodan Milosevic? Linda Tripp? Now, apparently you could, thanks to a new custom-stamp service from Stamps.com.

Launched last month, Stamps.com's service lets customers put wedding photos, pet portraits and other images on their postage, a notion that The Smoking Gun finds inappropriate.

In an effort to prove its point, The Smoking Gun submitted photos of some unlikely characters for custom stamps; Milosevic and Tripp were two of many "ridiculous" submissions, one of the site's editors said. Those stamps and others are being showcased in a gallery on the site.

"We thought we'd give this service a little integrity test," said Andrew Goldberg, managing editor of The Smoking Gun. "So we submitted a bunch of ridiculous photos to see which ones would stick."

Stamps.com, which received permission from the U.S. Postal Service to offer the PhotoStamps service on a trial basis, reserves the right to refuse printing stamps it deems inappropriate.

And in fact, some of The Smoking Gun's submissions were rejected, including pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald and mob informer Sammy "the Bull" Gravano.

On the first attempt, Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, was also rejected.

But Kaczynski's high school and college yearbook pictures were accepted, as were photos of Milosevic, who is currently standing trial in front of the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Stamps.com also printed stamps depicting Linda Tripp, famed confidante of Monica Lewinsky, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the couple executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviets. The Smoking Gun is also displaying stamps executed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey with Golan Cipel, and showing Lewinsky's blue dress (the one stained by President Clinton's DNA).

"It has always meant something to put someone's likeness on a stamp," Goldberg said. "And now anyone who wants to pay a premium can get on a stamp. It's lost some of the luster."

When it was launched on Aug. 10, Stamps.com's service was billed as a way for parents, pet owners, travelers and hobbyists to share their favorite digital photos. The idea was that for about twice the price of regular stamps, people could put just about anything on their custom postage.

Stamps.com on Thursday issued a statement lauding the success of the service. So far, 40,000 sheets, or 800,000 individual PhotoStamps, have been ordered. The company said that the most popular images showing up on stamps are those of babies, children, families, friends, pets and travel destinations.

A Stamps.com representative was unavailable for comment on this story.

[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.