Bootleggers are friends of mine too, but there's a difference (in my mind anyway) between putting out a product that had never had ironclad "commerical ownership" & simply laying in wait to grab something "legally" and then snatching it up & claiming it as your own "as is". Legal or not, it shows a disgusting lack of/unwillingness/inability to contribute creatively to the product itself.
BTW - those Everest issues of the entire Period catalog were, I'm pretty sure, legit. That was a Jerry Newman thing, iirc.