Terms of Service

The Service is operated by Erwann Robin (“we”, “us”, “our”) and provided from https://geopoly.bid. Legal, listing and takedown notices: legal@geopoly.bid.

GeoPoly is a market for digital advertising space organised as a hierarchy of territories named after real places: World → Country → Region → City → District → Street / Area → Building / Place → Advertising location. Each node is separately ownable on this platform.

A GeoPoly territory is a digital advertising space on this platform, named after a real place. It is not the place itself. Ownership confers no rights over physical land, buildings, addresses or any real-world property, no planning, licensing or access rights, and no relationship with, endorsement by, or authority over the people, businesses or public authorities of that location. Nothing on the Service is a security, an investment product, or a claim on real estate.

You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter a binding contract. If you use the Service for a company, you confirm you may bind that company, and “you” includes it. You may not use the Service if sanctions or other applicable law prohibit providing it to you. One person may hold one account; accounts created to bid against yourself or to evade a suspension may be closed.

Sign-in uses email links or WhatsApp phone verification through our providers. Keep access to your inbox and phone number secure: anything done through your session is treated as done by you. Tell us promptly at legal@geopoly.bid if you believe your account is compromised.

Every auction opens at $1, whatever the territory. Zoom level, population and economic importance change nothing about the opening price.

A bid is a real payment. When you bid, you are charged. Your bid becomes binding only once the payment provider confirms the charge; a failed or pending charge is not a bid.

Each accepted bid pushes the auction deadline out by 24 hours. Failed payments, rejected bids and simply opening the bid box never move the clock. Each bid must clear a minimum increment over the current price. The increment and the current price are calculated server-side, and the server figures are the authoritative ones — a number cached in your browser, shown during an outage, or produced by a bug does not create a right to that price.

Bids are irrevocable. You cannot cancel or lower a bid, and withdrawing from the auction does not return a bid that is still leading.

If you are outbid, the payment for your losing bid is refunded to the original payment method through the payment provider. Timing depends on that provider and your bank; we do not control it. Refunds of losing bids are the only refunds the Service makes as a matter of course.

A winning bid, a purchase, a rental and a platform fee are final and non-refundable. Being outbid later, a territory that earns less than you hoped, an advertiser who does not appear, downtime, or removal for breach of these Terms does not create a refund.

When 24 quiet hours pass, the last valid bidder wins and ownership transfers as soon as that payment settles. It is settlement, not the countdown, that transfers ownership. Ownership does not expire and the territory is not re-auctioned by us: it stays yours until you sell it, auction it or transfer it.

Ownership is a record on this platform. If the Service is discontinued, that record ends with it, subject to the notice we give under “Availability and changes”.

Owners may run their own advertising on a territory or rent the space to advertisers by day, week, month or year while keeping ownership. You are responsible for what you publish and for what you allow a renter to publish.

Advertising creatives, links and destinations must not:

• break any applicable law, including advertising, consumer and privacy rules;
• be malware, phishing, a scam, a link shortener hiding the real destination, or a chat or invite link used to move people off-platform for those purposes;
• contain sexual or adult-platform content, or content that is illegal, fraudulent, defamatory, harassing, hateful, violent, or that exploits children;
• infringe copyright, trademark, personality or other rights, or impersonate another person, brand or company;
• require licences you do not hold (financial, medical, gambling, weapons and similar);
• claim or imply any official status, endorsement or authority in respect of the real place the territory is named after.

Listings and advertising on GeoPoly are paid placements. They are not editorial selections, reviews, certifications or endorsements by us.

Payments are processed by our payment provider. We never collect or store full card numbers. Amounts are priced in US dollars and applicable taxes may be added.

A 30% pool is taken on settled sales only — never on a losing bid. It is divided between royalties paid up the territory hierarchy, the platform, and an ecosystem reserve. Owning a territory above the action earns you a royalty share of qualifying settled activity beneath it. The current split, minimum increments and royalty rules are platform settings shown in the Service, and we may change them for future transactions.

Every movement is written to an immutable transaction ledger.

Royalties and other earnings accrue to a platform balance. Earnings are held for a cooling-off period before they become available, and withdrawals are subject to a minimum amount and to review. A withdrawal request is an instruction to pay out to the method and details you supply; you are responsible for those details being correct, and we are not liable for funds sent to an account you entered incorrectly.

We may hold, reverse or refuse a withdrawal where a payment is disputed or reversed, where we suspect fraud, self-dealing or bid manipulation, or where the law requires it. Your balance is not a deposit, is not held by a bank, and earns no interest.

Reversing a settled payment without a legally required basis is a breach of these Terms. We may reverse the corresponding ownership, royalties and balance entries, remove advertising, and refuse further use of the Service.

The Service provides a disputes process for problems between owners, bidders and advertisers. We may decide those disputes to keep the market running — reversing a transaction, removing an advertisement, or transferring or reclaiming a territory. Those decisions bind the parties on this platform; they are not arbitration and do not affect rights you may have outside the Service.

We may refuse, delay, edit, recategorise, hide or permanently remove any bid, listing, advertisement, territory or account, with or without notice, where we believe these Terms or the law may have been broken, where a rights holder or authority complains, or where something creates legal, security or reputational risk. Removal for breach does not entitle you to a refund.

To run the map we display place names, geographic data, and public metadata (titles, descriptions, logos, favicons and preview images) for the destinations that advertising links to. We use that material only to identify a territory or a destination on GeoPoly. Place names are used descriptively; they do not indicate affiliation with, or endorsement by, any government, authority, business or rights holder.

GeoPoly, our wordmark and the look of the Service are ours. You may not copy the Service, scrape it to build a competing product, or use our brand in a way that suggests we endorse you.

You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, cache, reproduce, adapt for sizing and formatting, and publicly display the content you submit — advertising creatives, profile details and the public metadata we fetch — for as long as needed to operate, moderate, promote and archive the Service.

If you believe something on GeoPoly infringes your copyright, trademark, publicity or other rights, or that a destination is unlawful, email legal@geopoly.bid with: your name and contact details; the GeoPoly URL; the destination URL; a description of the problem; and a statement that the notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act. We may remove or restrict the content while we review, and may share the notice with the person who posted it. Repeat or abusive notices may be ignored.

Nothing on the Service is a promise of traffic, clicks, customers, revenue, royalties, resale value or any particular result. Prices, activity counts and rankings describe what our systems recorded; they are not a forecast. What a territory earns depends on the market, on what you do with it, and on factors we do not control. We do not give investment, tax or legal advice.

The Service is provided as-is. It may be unavailable, slow or wrong. We may change auction rules, increments, fee splits, royalty rules, features and these Terms. If a change is material we will update the date at the top of this page, and continued use means you accept it. The Terms in effect when you paid still govern that payment, except where a change is required by law or to address a security or legal risk.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or secure, or that prices, deadlines, ownership records, royalty calculations, place data or activity counts are accurate or complete.

We do not exclude liability that the law says cannot be excluded, including for intent, gross negligence, or injury to life, body or health. Subject to that: we are not liable for lost profits, lost data, lost goodwill, lost royalties, the value a territory would have had, or other indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages; and our total liability for a claim relating to a payment is limited to the amount you paid us in connection with the transaction the claim concerns.

You will defend, indemnify and hold harmless the operator of the Service from claims, damages, losses and reasonable legal fees arising out of your bids, your advertising, your destinations, your chargeback, your breach of these Terms, or your infringement of someone else’s rights. We may take over the defence of a claim; you will cooperate.

These Terms are governed by French law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules. If you are a consumer with mandatory local protections, those still apply to you. Otherwise the courts of France have exclusive jurisdiction, to the extent permitted.

If part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest stays in effect and the invalid part is replaced by the closest valid term. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them with a transfer of the Service. These Terms, the Privacy Policy and the details confirmed at checkout are the entire agreement for the Service.

Questions: legal@geopoly.bid.