Koinup Adds Printed Screenshot Service for Buying & Selling RL Copies of Virtual World Screenshots

Here's a new service in Beta from Koinup which enables members of the virtual world-based social network to buy and sell real world printed copies of screenshots they've taken, and while I'm pretty biased (Koinup is former sponsor to this blog), I think it's a great idea. If you enjoy creating beautiful screenshots for Second Life, OpenSim, and other worlds, you can send your images to Bigoom, the service which handles the printing and shipping, and make money by selling them. If you like virtual world screenshots (and who doesn't), here's a place to buy them as hardcopies you can frame and hang on the wall. I just got a beautifully printed copy of this screenshot by Annie Klavinham (above) sent from Italy in a nice poster tube delivered in days to my San Francisco apartment.

Go here to read more about Koinup's service. If I'm reading the details right, this might enable Koinup users to print and sell screenshots from games like World of Warcraft and The Sims, which don't have the same user-created IP rights policy as Second Life/OpenSim, so that may be an issue. But that aside, I definitely think this could be fun service for SLers to play with.

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Comments

[Harper Ganesvoort]

I've been toying with the idea since I found it on Koinup this morning. I've started doing more art-oriented instead of modeling shots, and this might be a nice thing to try.

[Pierluigi]

thanks Wagner for this post. Indeed it's true that some virtual worlds don't have the same "tos" regarding copyright as second life. But when we address the issue internally at Koinup we considered the following:

1. 99% of the contents in Koinup come from worlds an/or software where authors own the rigth to sell the contents they own (second life, the sims, imvu, frenzoo)

2. the remaining part (1%) (ie screenshots from world of warcrat) come from worlds with more restrictive "tos", but they are based on such a level of creative manipolation that in some cases it's even difficult recognize the original source

because of these reason we thought that it would make sense to open the print integration to all worlds, without restriction.

[Marx Dudek]

Is the quality markedly better than, say, the quality of a large format print I would get at Kinko's or a similar local bricks and mortar print outlet?

[Bigoom]

@Marx Dudek I checked out a lot of service and I can guanteed that our print quality is very fine. We are using artistic quality plotters and fine art supports. Hope you will confirm what I'm saying :) thanks!

[Annie Klavinham]

I'm thrilled you chose one of my pictures for this and so pleased to hear that the print quality is great. Thanks also to pier for all he does for koinup.

Thank you,
Annie