Originally Posted by Mark17
To me, the proverbial elephant in the room is this: Exactly (and I mean, EXACTLY) what is illegal? I am not saying that deception is not happening in these well documented cases, and I am not in any way defending deceptive practices, but from a legal perspective, what can and what cannot a person do to a card before re-selling it?
Obviously, turning a Magee into a Magie is fraud. But consider:
1. If I find an all original 1966 Ford Mustang in Aunt Nellie's barn, and then clean the pigeon poop off the hood, vacuum and use stain remover on the flooring, put air in the tires, can't I still sell it as 100% original? Note that I did not replace the tires, hoses, belts, gaskets, which would have made it no longer "all original." All I did was clean off dirt. So, what's different between that and cleaning dirt of an otherwise original card?
2. If I buff out a scratch on that old Mustang, how is that different than spooning out a wrinkle?
3. What is the legal rule, exactly, on cutting (or trimming) cards? If I have a 1962 Post Cereal card that was hand cut to begin with, and has wide borders, can I trim it down to the correct card size, giving it razor sharp edges and corners? If not, why?
4. Suppose I find an uncut panel of Post cards, or Bazooka, or 1975 Hostess. Can I get them laser-cut into 10s? They were meant to be cut by the collector in the first place.
5. In the Junk Wax era, when many people like me were buying Topps vending cases by the hundreds and getting them sorted down, a guy named Rick Starks came up with a brilliant idea. Doing business as Steven Juskywicz (something like that,) he bought tons of uncut sheets directly from Topps and had them laser cut himself. I mean, pallets upon pallets of sheets. What was brilliant about it is that he'd have a bunch of the same sheets on the cutting machine at the same time, so when they were cut, stacks of the same card could be lifted off the cutter and set into 800-count boxes.
In other words, no sorting necessary. I finally got smart and purchased my 1990 Topps inventory from him. I bought 800 complete sets and what I received were 792 800-count boxes, each box contained 800 of the same card. It only took me a few hours to sort them into teams (for the teams I could sell) and separate the keepers from the commons.
When you'd open one of those boxes and look at the edges, they were smooth as glass. Perfectly cut. Plus, the centering was way better than the cards Topps was cutting. I will bet6 that a large percentage of graded Topps cards from that era, especially 9s and 10s, were cards cut not by Topps, but by Steven Juskywicz, Inc.
So, if someone found a vintage sheet of cards today, could they get it professionally cut to produce some beautiful individual cards? If not, how would that be different from the above example. For that matter, what would the difference be between cutting a sheet of cards, and buying a vintage sheet of stamps and breaking up the sheet to sell the stamps individually?
Before people start jumping all over me, please understand, I am NOT defending or advocating deception. My point is: What, exactly and precisely, is illegal, and what is not?
We can't simply say that certain people and companies are "Guilty" without defining exactly what they are guilty of. What does the law say about doing stuff to your baseball cards?
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