Steiner Question..

I often see CDs for sale on ebay that have Steiner pages per country, but include color or black and white stamp images. They offer the pages in US Letter and A4 page sizes.

I have emailed Bill Steiner asking if any of these guys are authorized resellers of his pages and he has never gotten back to me.

Does anyone know if any of these ebay sellers are legit?

Here's an example:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/POLAND-STAM...em1c25f4608c

I have a Steiner online subscription and his pages do not look anything like those. This ebay listing is for color pages, etc. The Steiner pages are very simple; all black and white (as far as I have seen)with a little denomination number; sometimes a color (word) if needed .. no real designs of stamps shown (just an occasional number font for something like an overprint) ... no Scott numbers because they are copyrighted.

For Poland, whoever put the stamps onto the Steiner pages,- and they ARE Steiner pages without a doubt- then scanned them to make these "color illustrated" pages made an error on the "Occupation Stamps overprinted or Surcharged 1918-19" spaces.

The Scott 18 5pf green stamp is in the Steiner Scott 16 5pf on 2 1/2pf space; the Scott Scott 16 5pf on 2 1/2pf gray stamp is in the Steiner Scott 17 5pf on 3pf space, and the Scott 17 5pf on 3pf brown stamp is in the Steiner Scott 18 5pf space. (I checked my own Poland Steiner pages for verification.)

Sloppy.

Appears they are Steiner pages and this appears to be a copyright violation. I'm sure if Bill Steiner presented a case to ebay they would remove the listing.

But keep in mind that copyright laws are not world-wide, they vary from country to country. And of course then you get into the cost/time involved having to pursue legal remedies across international boundaries. This lister is from Portugal; even there hiring a lawyer and bringing suit would not be for someone who is faint of heart or who doesn't have deep pockets (imagine if the lister was from Kathmandu).
don

I understand about copyright laws and the cost of legal representation. But getting ebay listing removed is just a matter of a few emails.

Most of the listings say that new supplements are available around February and they say a "link" in included to download the supplements.

If you ever looked at stampalbums.com really well, you'd learn, you only need the username and password to login and see the list of page names. If you know the filename you're looking for, you can link to it directly and just download it. Pretty much seals the deal that these are fake.

I wonder if the community can do anything to get these listings taken down.

Bill Steiner does, in fact, license some folks to sell his pages as pre-printed. Currently there are only three licensed names listed on his web site http://stampalbums.com/printed_pages.htm. If you are dealing with one of the three persons listed at Bill Steiner's web site, then they are legitimate.

That seller has been around and selling these for a long time. I looked long and hard at those before I knew about Steiner's site, but I never bought from them. Steiner may have figured it'll be too much time and effort to pursue this seller, but it may behoove him to, anyway. The way copyright law works in this country, if one is aware of someone violating your copyright, but you choose not to pursue them, future courts may look at that and say that you've willingly walked away from your own copyright. I'm sure a legal expert could explain it better, but that's my understanding. In other words, you need to defend your copyright every single time or you might not be allowed to defend it at all in the future. Having the violator outside the US may change things, though.

This makes me wonder why Steiner doesn't sell his own CD's on ebay. You can get the whole world from him on his site for $30 - seems he could make a killing selling CD's or downloads on ebay with certain countries or regions for a portion of that, or the whole shebang for about $40 or $50.

There are several sellers on ebay offering these pirate Steiner pages. I directly asked one of them some time ago if he were selling Steiner's products and got a reply that no, they were his own design. I replied with an attachment of the Steiner page that corresponded with the page in his ebay listing and called him a cheat and a liar. I never heard back of course. The effrontery of these people is almost beyond comprehension- why would anyone buy from someone like this?

I took it upon myself to report Filkomstamps to ebay. We'll see what comes of it. Bill Steiner does good work. I think everyone should take the 5 minutes out and report an ebay listing selling pirate Steiner pages.

It's as bad as the guys selling The Scott 2009 Catalog on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM with the CD Label glued on the front to try and make it look legit.

A small update on this topic and confirmation that the pages we sell on ebay under our seller id Filkomstamps are fully licensed by Bill Steiner. A license agreement was signed back in 1999 and we pay each year a license fee to the Stamps Albums Web and for each CD we sell a part goes to Bill Steiner.

Jan

I think it should be clarified that the three sellers listed above who are licensed to sell Bill Steiner's print-you-own album pages are not selling some kind of different or altered version of his pages. They are selling his actual pages, but they are printing them for you instead of you having to print them yourself. This saves you the cost of the paper, ink, and the time it takes to print the pages.

And there's another difference which I find really helpful. Most collectors are limited generally to 8.5 x 11" pages printed on their home computer printer. Nearly all Steiner album pages end up as this size which I find too small and unappealing for my taste. But the sellers who print Steiner's pages can also print them on paper sized for Minkus, Scott Specialty, and Scott International albums. For me, that's a tremendous help as I have no printer that will print on pages that large and I use the two Scott albums I've mentioned. There are lots of times I've added Steiner pages on Scott-sized paper to my existing collections.

And yes, the three sellers linked to above (Brittania Stamps in the UK, Filkom stamps in Belgium, and AlbumPages in the USA) are all legitimately licensed by Bill Steiner. The other albums you see on ebay with similar or identical page layouts, including the one asked about in this thread, are not legitimate. They have stolen Steiner's page layouts. Buying them you buy from a thief which I doubt any of us could live with.