I recently came across Wikipedia’s article on private overprinting of postage stamps. This basically entails having pictures or text rubberstamped overtop of a postage stamp by some person or entity other than a government or other official stamp-issuing entity. Quoth Wikipedia:
This sounds like something I’d be interested in doing. Well, not overprinting swastikas or fascist logos, but rather adding a personal touch to my outgoing mail with a nice custom logo or text on the stamps. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article doesn’t state whether overprinting is legal or if it invalidates the stamps. (It does reference a case of Oxford Union Society asking the Royal Mail for permission to overprint, but that was in 1859, so for all I know the rules have since changed.)
So, my question is then as follows: is it currently legal to send mail with overprinted stamps in the UK, the USA, Canada, or anywhere else? If yes, do the overprinted stamps count as vaild postage? (If not, I suppose I can always buy a bunch of penny stamps to overprint and then also affix sufficient non-overprinted postage beside them.)
You can have cafepress or stamps.com print you stamps with any picture you like, creating your own custom legal postal tender if overprinting doesn’t pan out.
Not in the UK, I can’t. But anyway, I think it would be more fun to overprint; the idea of stamping spectacles, a moustache, and goatee on the queen amuses me.
Since you’ve mentioned that, can anyone debunk the idea that it is illegal to deface the queen’s image?
As to the OP, I got nothin’, other than to say: surely you can personalise your post by decorating the envelope, rather than the stamp itself? I would also assume that an overprinted stamp would not be acceptable since that is what a postmark is for, so the stamp would look like it had already been used.
Surely I could. But then that wouldn’t be nearly so unique an embellishment. Besides, what if I wanted to alter a particular stamp in a certain humorous or political way? The joke or message might be more potent when applied directly to the stamp instead of made elsewhere on the envelope. For example, an anti-monarchist slogan such as “Down with the monarchy!” overprinted on the queen would be a political statement, whereas the same slogan printed elsewhere on the envelope would seem oddly hypocritical if one used the ubiquitous Machin stamps.
I dunno; IMHO a moustache on a portrait or a slogan stamped with odd-coloured ink couldn’t easily be mistaken as a cancellation. I think postal workers are familiar enough with cancellation marks to recognize a valid one.
You’re probably right, unless this is checked by a machine. Also, some postmarks are not very clear, so I can see potential for confusion. Let’s hope someone can give a firmer answer to all these questions!
There are quite a few restrictions on what kind of pictures you can have printed. The first test-run of this service had a bunch of people trying to “push” the limits and they submitted pictures of mass-murderers and other political nare-do-wells and tried to sneak them thru. Many did get past the censors. So they’re really watching things now, and I suspect that any kind of political message would be prohibited. In fact, I think you can only do personal photos and such on the stamps…
Here are the restrictions from the Stamps.com website:
The Smoking Gun got quite a few through, including images of Slobodan Milosevic, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Nicolae Ceaucescu, and Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress.
I made an enquiry to the Royal Mail and just got back a rather surprising response. In summary, they claim that private overprints are not permitted, not because the overprint counts as a cancellation mark, but because it is “breach of copyright”. I’m rather skeptical of this claim, since although an overprint indeed modifies the stamp, it’s not being published. In my view overprinting a stamp is no more breach of copyright than writing annotations in a book you own.
I would suspect that copywrite comes up due to the rights to modify and to distribute. In open source software, these are the main things that are being turned over by the copywrite holder in the license. So assuming that is translatable to stamps, I can see how that could theoretically be an issue.
Hey, no one is talking about mass-producing and then publishing or selling these overprinted stamps. I would be buying the stamps from the post office, defacing them, and then giving them right back to the post office (albeit stuck onto an envelope) in payment of services. The only two entities involved in this transaction are me and the post office, so I don’t see how this could be considered “distributing”. Once the stamps are given back to the post office, who is the rightful owner of the intellectual property thereon, whatever they choose to do with them is their business. If they deliver them as-is, then they’re the ones doing the “distribution”. They’re perfectly free to return the envelope to me, or to remove and destroy the stamps before delivery, if they don’t want their IP being distributed.
Just my own suspicions, but that doesn’t make much sense to me. Would writing margin notes in my own book violate copyright? I can deface my own book however I like, and the copyright law can’t touch me. Why would a single stamp be any different, so long as the image is not published somehow?
