Buy The World is operated by Spaghetti Code, Hesseløgade 6, 3. tv., 9000 Aalborg, Denmark, CVR 39003252. Contact: [email protected].
A square is a non-exclusive licence to display one image, one caption and one link on a single cell of the Buy The World map, permanently. It is a digital service. It is not real property, not a legal interest in land, not a security, not an investment, and not a token. It confers no rights over the physical territory the cell happens to cover.
A square is yours for good. There is no renewal, no expiry and no condition you have to keep meeting. Once a square is paid for it is out of circulation permanently: it is not resold, not reclaimed, and not taken back if you never sign in again.
Nobody can take a square from you. Not for any price, and not by outbidding you. There is exactly one mechanism in this site by which an owned square changes hands, and it is your own: you may give it away, to an address you name, and only if the person at that address accepts. Clause 4 is how. Nothing else moves a square — not a bid, not an auction, not time, not us — and that is the whole of what is being sold.
What has a clock on it is the map, not your square. The site runs on a countdown shown publicly on every page: it opens with a fixed number of days, and every square anybody claims adds 3.65 more. If it reaches zero the map goes dark and stops being published. That is a limit on how long the service exists, and we are telling you about it before you buy rather than burying it: your claim does not expire, is never reassigned, and is not taken from you, but it is a claim on a map, and a map has to be somewhere.
$2.00 a square, once. The price does not change with demand, with how many are left, with how long you hold it, or with who you are. There is nothing further to pay, ever.
This is not an investment, nothing here appreciates for you, and no money ever comes back to you from holding a square.
Each square carries one image and one inscription — a caption and a link.
You may change any of it as often as you like, for as long as you hold the square. There is no limit on the number of times the image, the caption or the link may be replaced, and no charge for doing so. Nothing has to be spent and nothing is used up.
The caption and the link are one inscription and are saved together, so a square is never left with a caption describing something the link no longer points at.
Replacing an image deletes the one it replaces. We do not keep previous versions of your image and cannot restore one for you, so keep your own copy of anything you care about. Every change is recorded against the square as a matter of record; the picture itself is not.
The caption and the link are limited to 2000 characters each. That is a limit of the register, not a rationing of changes.
You may give a square you hold to anybody, and nobody may take one. Those are the same rule from two sides, and this clause is the whole of the first. There is no sale, no transfer fee and no market: a square is given or it stays where it is.
Nothing moves until they accept. You name an email address; we write to it and ask. Until somebody at that address says yes, the square is still yours in every respect — it stays on the map, you can still change the image, the caption and the link, and you can take the offer back. If they say no, or say nothing for 14 days, the offer closes and the square is still yours.
Once they accept it is theirs, and you cannot take it back. It is theirs on exactly these terms, permanently, and everything in clause 1 that protected you now protects them — against you as much as against anybody. You stop being able to change what is on it, and we will not show you what they choose to put there.
A square you could still get your money back on cannot be given away. While you hold a live right of withdrawal (clause 9) a refund would take the square back off whoever you gave it to, so the two are not allowed to overlap. Let the 14 days run out, or publish the square immediately — which is express consent and ends the right — and you may give it away then. A square suspended while we review a report cannot be given away either; handing it on is not how that gets settled.
Giving a square away is not a refund and does not entitle you to one. It is a thing you chose to do with something you owned.
You may close your account at any time, from your own account page. When you do, you choose whether your squares stay on the map permanently, unattached to you and unchangeable thereafter, or are taken down and the images deleted.
Neither puts the cell back on sale. A square you paid for is not returned to the market by you closing your account, any more than by anything else. If you take yours down the cell is retired and stays blank.
Closing your account is not a refund, and it is not how you exercise the right of withdrawal — if you mean to withdraw, do that first.
Illegal content is removed immediately, at our sole discretion, and no money is returned. This applies to everything you put on a square — the image, the caption and the link alike. If any of it is unlawful, or breaches the acceptable use policy, we may take it down at any time, without notice beforehand, without waiting for a complaint, and without refunding the purchase price or any part of it. We do not have to prove a case to you first, and we do not have to put it back.
We may also remove a square where a link on it points somewhere unlawful, deceptive or harmful, even though the image itself is unobjectionable. The link is content you published.
Removal is not a transfer. The square stays registered to you and is never resold to anybody else. What comes off is what was printed on it.
You will be told what was removed and why, and you can dispute it — see clause 11. That is your right and it is not affected by anything above; what it does not do is delay the removal.
The price you see is the price you pay. $2.00 per square is the total. Nothing is added at the end, nothing changes with where you are, and there is no separate line for tax, fees or handling.
No sales tax or VAT is charged to you. None is added to your payment, none is itemised on your receipt, and you are not asked for a billing address in order to work one out. We are not registered for VAT, so we may not charge it, may not show it on a receipt, and do not issue VAT invoices. The price is set high enough to cover what it costs us to sell a square — the card fee, the currency conversion, and any tax we may owe on the sale — and those are ours to carry rather than lines added to your bill.
Your own bank is not us. We charge $2.00, in USD, and nothing else. If your card is issued in another currency your bank or card issuer may add its own conversion or cross-border charge on top of that, at its own rates and without telling us. That is between you and them: we do not set it, do not receive it and cannot refund it.
If you need a receipt, write to [email protected] quoting the address you paid with and we will send a plain one, showing what you paid and for what. If any of this changes — if a tax has to be collected from you and shown to you — this clause changes with it before it happens, not after.
Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. A square is held for you for 5 minutes while you check out, and released back to the market if payment is not completed in that time. Stripe's own checkout page stays open longer than that. If you pay after your hold has lapsed, the square is still yours provided nobody else has taken it in the meantime; if somebody has, the payment is refunded in full and automatically.
As a consumer in the EU you have 14 days from the day the contract is concluded to withdraw from a distance purchase of digital content, without giving any reason.
How to withdraw. Tell us in a clear statement before the 14 days are up: an email to [email protected] saying which square and the address you paid with is enough. It is enough that you send it before the deadline. We refund everything you paid within 14 days of being told, by the same means you paid, at no cost to you, and the square goes back on sale.
How you lose it. At checkout you may consent to us putting your square on the map straight away and acknowledge that you thereby lose the right of withdrawal. That consent is yours to give or withhold:
A square under a live right of withdrawal cannot be bought from you by anyone, and cannot be given away by you either — see clause 4.
We confirm which of the two you chose in the email we send when your purchase completes.
You must own or be licensed to use whatever you upload, and it must comply with our acceptable use policy. You grant us the licence needed to store, resize, re-encode and display your image on the map and in previews.
We may suspend a square from public display while we review a report, before deciding anything. Suspension is not a finding against you.
Where content is removed for being unlawful or for breaching the acceptable use policy, no refund is due — not for the image, not for the square, not in part. You paid for a square and you still have it; what you may not do is use it for that.
Where we remove a square for our own convenience rather than for anything you did, we refund the purchase price in full.
When we remove or suspend something of yours we will send you a statement of what was removed, on what ground, and how to contest it. You may reply to that statement and ask us to look again, and a person will. If you think we have it wrong you may also take the matter to an out-of-court dispute settlement body, or to a court — nothing in these terms takes that away.
Anyone can report a square from the panel beside it, or by writing to [email protected]. Reports of apparently criminal content are passed to the authorities where the law requires it.
The number of days left is shown on the front of the site at all times. It is not a marketing device and it is not reset quietly: it goes up only when somebody claims a square, by 3.65 days each.
If it reaches zero we stop publishing the map. We will write to every holder before that happens, at the address on their claim. Nothing is charged at that point and nothing further is owed by you.
Because of this, do not read “yours for good” as a promise that a website will exist forever — no honest seller can promise that. Read it as what it is: for as long as this map is published, that square is yours, it cannot run out, and nobody can buy it from you.
We aim to keep the service running indefinitely but make no guarantee of uptime. If the service is discontinued, we will give reasonable notice and make owners' images available for download.
Buy The World is a satire about who owns the world and what it costs to keep hold of any of it. Being a joke does not make it less of a contract: this is real money paid to a real company, and everything above applies exactly as written.
Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited. Otherwise our total liability for any square is capped at the amount you paid for it.
These terms are governed by Danish law, without prejudice to the mandatory consumer protections of your country of residence. EU consumers may also use the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform.