Legal Notice / Imprint — Gigapop

1. What this page is

This is the legal notice for gigapop.app. In some countries a page like this is called an Impressum or Anbieterkennzeichnung — for example under § 5 of the German Digital Services Act (DDG). This page is intended to serve that purpose.

It sits alongside three other documents, and they do different jobs:

TO BE COMPLETED — link each of the three other documents by its live URL. Naming them without linking them makes the information harder to reach than it has to be, and the pre-contractual information must be genuinely accessible, not merely referred to.

2. Who operates Gigapop

Gigapop is operated by an individual, not by a company.

We have no establishment, office, branch or subsidiary in the European Union. We say this as a plain statement of fact, not as a disclaimer: EU law still applies to us in full.

• Gigapop is offered in Russian and English, priced in euros, and marketed to people living in the EU. That means we are directing our activities at EU consumers. EU consumer protection law therefore applies, and under Article 6 of the Rome I Regulation the mandatory protections of the law of your own country of residence apply to your purchase and cannot be taken away from you by anything we write in our Terms.
• For the same reason the GDPR applies to us under its Article 3(2)(a), and we have the same obligations as a controller established in the EU.

Where Gigapop runs

Our servers are hosted with Hetzner Online GmbH in Finland, inside the EU/EEA. Some of the companies we use to generate songs are outside the EU/EEA. Which ones, and on what legal footing your data reaches them, is set out in the Privacy Policy.

Renting servers in Finland is not the same as being established in the EU, and we are not claiming it is — an establishment needs a real, stable presence, which we do not have. We mention this only so the two statements above do not look like a contradiction. It does not change anything to your advantage or ours: EU law applies to us either way, as set out above.

Data protection contact

For anything about personal data — access, correction, deletion, objection — write to hi@gigapop.app. Please put "Data protection" in the subject line so it is routed quickly.

Our representative in the European Union (GDPR Article 27):

TO BE COMPLETED — the name, postal address and email address of the EU representative, appointed in writing by mandate, established in a Member State where our users are. This is mandatory for a controller in our position and the details must appear here. Until this is filled in, data protection enquiries go to hi@gigapop.app, and that is not a substitute for the appointment.

Once appointed, you may contact the representative instead of us on any question about how we handle your personal data. Doing so does not reduce your rights, and it does not shift our own responsibility — that stays with us.

Contact points and representative under the Digital Services Act

Gigapop stores things you provide — the audio you upload or record for a remix, what jam guests contribute, and the pages that let you share a finished song by link. Where a service does that, the EU Digital Services Act requires published contact points and, for a provider with no establishment in the Union, a legal representative inside it.

TO BE COMPLETED — three separate items, all of which must appear on this page:

1. A single point of contact for Member State authorities, the Commission and the European Board for Digital Services (DSA Art. 11), stating the means of communication and the languages it works in — which must include an official language of a Member State.
2. A point of contact for users (DSA Art. 12), allowing direct, rapid, electronic communication with a human, and stating plainly that it is not solely automated.
3. A legal representative in the Union (DSA Art. 13), designated in writing, resident or established in a Member State where the service is offered, with name, postal address, email and telephone published here. This is separate from the GDPR Article 27 representative above and is not discharged by it, although the same provider may be mandated for both.

Reviewer: confirm the classification first — whether Gigapop is a hosting service, and whether it is also an online platform because shared song pages disseminate content to the public. If it is only a hosting service, Arts. 11–13 still apply. The micro/small-enterprise exemption in Art. 19 does not reach them.

3. Responsible for the content of this website

Ivan Smetanin, at the contact details in section 2.

4. Who you are buying from — Merchant of Record

This is the part people most often get wrong, so read it carefully.

When you pay for anything on Gigapop — a song, a jam video, or anything else we charge for — you are not buying from Ivan Smetanin. You are buying from Dodo Payments, which acts as the merchant of record — that is, as a reseller selling in its own name, as principal.

What that means in practice:

• Dodo Payments is the seller and your contracting party for the purchase. Your contract of sale is with Dodo Payments, not with us.
• We set the price. Dodo Payments charges and collects it. We want to be exact about this rather than hide behind the payment provider: the amount you are asked to pay is decided by us, and Dodo Payments is who takes the money.
• There is more than one paid product. A song and a jam video are priced separately.

TO BE COMPLETED — state the current price of each paid product, inclusive of all taxes and charges, and say plainly whether VAT is already contained in the figure shown or is added at checkout. At the time of drafting the defaults in the code were EUR 29 for a song and EUR 99 for a jam video, and a percentage discount can be applied by us at any time. Do not publish a single price as though it were the only one, and do not publish a figure as VAT-inclusive until that has been confirmed in a live test checkout. The price shown to you before you buy must be the price you actually pay.

• Dodo Payments collects and remits EU VAT and issues your invoice or receipt. We do not invoice you and we are not permitted to.
• Dodo Payments executes refunds. We can authorise a refund, but we cannot pay it to you directly — it is paid out by Dodo Payments.
• We provide the service itself: the lyrics, the song, the cover, the karaoke video, the jam feature, and support for all of it.

Seller / merchant of record:

Because Dodo Payments is the seller, it is the trader for the purposes of EU consumer law on your purchase. It owes you, directly:

• the pre-contractual information before you are bound;
• an order button that says "order with obligation to pay" or something equally unambiguous;
• a confirmation of the contract on a durable medium — in practice, an email you keep in your own mailbox, not a page on a website;
• the right of withdrawal, and the online withdrawal function dealt with in section 7;
• refunds within 14 days, by the same means of payment, with no fee deducted.

What this does not do: naming Dodo Payments as the seller does not reduce your rights, and it is not a way for us to avoid responsibility. If our service is faulty, that is our problem to fix, and section 6 tells you how to start. Nothing on this page or in our Terms can waive or restrict the rights EU law gives you (Consumer Rights Directive Art. 25; Digital Content Directive Art. 22).

5. How to reach a human

Email: hi@gigapop.app — this is the fastest route and it reaches a person, not a bot.

• Write in Russian or English. Both are fine.
• We aim to reply within TO BE COMPLETED — state an honest, achievable response time (for example "2 working days"). Do not publish a commitment we cannot keep; a stated service promise becomes a conformity benchmark under Digital Content Directive Art. 8.
• There is no phone queue, no chatbot gate and no paid support tier. You do not have to create an account, buy anything, or use a form to get an answer.
• If you are writing about a specific song or jam, including the link to it helps us a lot — but it is not a condition of getting help.

Please tell us plainly what went wrong. We would much rather fix a problem ourselves than have you go through the complaint routes below.

6. Complaints

Step 1 — tell us

Write to hi@gigapop.app and describe the problem. Most things are solved here.

If we get it wrong, you keep every right described below. Contacting us first is not a precondition for complaining elsewhere, and it does not pause any legal deadline.

Step 2 — complaints about payment, price, VAT, the invoice, refunds or withdrawal

These are matters for Dodo Payments as the seller (see section 4). You can go to them directly. You can also write to us and we will take it up with them on your behalf — but you never have to go through us, and we cannot require you to.

To be clear, because clauses like this are sometimes used to shut consumers down: the fact that Dodo Payments executes refunds does not make your refund discretionary, and it does not extend the 14-day deadline. Payment-processor settlement schedules are not a valid reason for a late refund.

Step 3 — complaints about the service itself

Faults in the song, the karaoke video, the jam, delivery failures, or the site not working are ours. Write to hi@gigapop.app. Your legal guarantee of conformity under the Digital Content Directive is separate from, and longer than, the 14-day withdrawal period, and it cannot be signed away in advance. The Terms of Service explain it.

One thing we should not leave ambiguous, because it works in your favour: we take on service faults ourselves in addition to, not instead of, whatever you can claim from Dodo Payments as the seller. Since the contract of sale is with Dodo Payments, your legal guarantee of conformity runs against the seller. Us agreeing to fix things does not move that right, use it up, or oblige you to come to us first. If you would rather go straight to the seller, you may.

7. Withdrawal from a purchase

The right of withdrawal, when it applies, when it stops applying, and how to use the online withdrawal function, is dealt with in the Terms of Service, because it belongs with the purchase terms rather than here.

TO BE COMPLETED — link here to the online withdrawal function required by CRD Art. 11a, which has applied since 19 June 2026. It must be labelled "withdraw from contract here" (or an unambiguous equivalent), be prominently displayed, be continuously available throughout the withdrawal period, and not be buried behind a login or inside the Terms. It must also let the consumer submit a withdrawal statement together with the information identifying the contract, and the trader must acknowledge receipt on a durable medium without undue delay, recording the content of the statement and the date and time it was received. Confirm in writing which party — Dodo Payments as seller, or Gigapop on its interface — hosts it and issues that acknowledgment, and link to it from this page and from the checkout.

Do not repeat the drafting error that was corrected here. An earlier version of this note said that the absence of the function extends the withdrawal period by up to twelve months under CRD Art. 10(1). That overstates the law and should not be relied on. The twelve-month extension in Art. 10(1) attaches to a failure to supply the Art. 6(1)(h) information about the right of withdrawal. Failing to provide the Art. 11a function is a distinct breach whose consequence is national enforcement and penalties under CRD Art. 24 — it triggers the extension only where, on the facts, the Art. 6(1)(h) information was itself not properly given. The reviewer should state the position for the relevant Member States rather than assert a single EU-wide answer.

8. Alternative dispute resolution, and the EU ODR platform

The EU Online Dispute Resolution platform no longer exists

You may have seen websites linking to an "EU ODR platform" at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. That platform was shut down on 20 July 2025 after Regulation (EU) 2024/3228 repealed the Regulation that created it. There is nothing to link to, and any site still pointing you there is sending you to a dead end.

Use these instead:

• List of official consumer dispute resolution bodies in every Member State, Norway and Iceland: https://consumer-redress.ec.europa.eu/dispute-resolution-bodies
• Practical consumer advice on the Commission's Your Europe site: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers

Are we signed up to an ADR body?

TO BE COMPLETED — state plainly whether Gigapop is committed to, or obliged to use, any alternative dispute resolution entity, and name it if so. This disclosure is required by CRD Art. 6(1)(t) and Art. 13 of Directive 2013/11/EU. If the answer is no — which is the likely position — the page must say so honestly rather than leave the question open. Note for the reviewer: Directive (EU) 2025/2647 (in force 19 January 2026, to be transposed by 20 March 2028) extends consumer ADR to disputes with third-country traders that direct their activities at the EU, expressly including contracts for digital content and digital services. That is exactly our situation, so this answer will need revisiting well before 2028.

Cross-border help

If you live in the EU, Norway or Iceland, the European Consumer Centres Network (ECC-Net) gives free advice on cross-border consumer problems: https://www.eccnet.eu

We should be straight with you about a limitation here: ECC-Net principally assists with traders established in the EU/EEA. Because we are established in Kazakhstan, an ECC may not be able to take your case up with us in the way it would with an EU-based trader. That is a real gap, we are not going to pretend otherwise, and it is one more reason to write to us first.

9. Going to court

You keep the right to go to court. If you live in the EU, you can generally bring proceedings in the courts of your own country of residence, and you do not have to travel to ours. For consumer contracts this holds regardless of where the trader is established — so the fact that we are in Kazakhstan, and that Dodo Payments is not an EU company either, does not push you into a foreign court. We can only sue you in the courts of your own country of residence. Nothing in our Terms takes any of that away, and any clause that tried to would be void.

The same honesty we applied to ECC-Net above applies here. Winning a judgment and enforcing it are different things: because neither we nor the seller are established in the EU, enforcing an EU judgment against us may be slower and more awkward than it would be against an EU trader. That is a reason to use the earlier routes first — write to us, and take payment, refund and withdrawal matters to Dodo Payments as the seller — not a reason to think the right is worthless. We would rather tell you this now than have you discover it later.

10. Data protection complaints

If you think we have mishandled your personal data:

1. Tell us first at hi@gigapop.app, or tell our EU representative once appointed (section 2). We would rather fix it.
2. Complain to a data protection authority. Under GDPR Article 77 you may complain to a supervisory authority in particular in the Member State where you live, where you work, or where you think the problem happened. The choice is yours. Find your national authority here: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/about-edpb/members_en
3. Go to court. Under GDPR Article 79 you also have the right to an effective judicial remedy, including before the courts of the Member State where you live. Under Article 82 you may claim compensation for material or non-material damage caused by an infringement.
4. Have someone do it for you. Under GDPR Article 80 you may mandate a not-for-profit body active in data protection to lodge the complaint and exercise those rights on your behalf. You do not have to deal with us directly to enforce your rights.

We do not have a "lead" or "one-stop-shop" supervisory authority, because we have no establishment in the EU. That means no single authority is the competent one — you are free to approach your own, and we will not tell you that you have come to the wrong place.

11. AI-generated content

Gigapop generates lyrics, music, cover art and karaoke video using AI. How that is disclosed, and what we do and do not do with voices, is described in the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.

TO BE COMPLETED — before 2 August 2026. Confirm and state (a) whether Gigapop is a deployer of a third-party music generation system or has become its provider by offering it under its own name or trademark, since that determines who owes the AI Act Art. 50(2) machine-readable marking duty; (b) whether any feature imitates the voice of a real, existing person, which would make the output a deep fake and trigger the Art. 50(4) disclosure duty with an audible disclaimer at the start of audio-only content; and (c) the national market surveillance authority route for AI Act complaints, which is separate from the data protection authority route in section 10.

12. Languages

This notice is published in English and Russian — the two languages the Gigapop interface itself supports. We try to keep both versions saying the same thing, but we are not going to promise you they are always identical to the word, because we would not always be able to keep that promise.

So here is the rule instead, and it is the one that protects you: you may rely on whichever version was shown to you. If the two versions differ, the difference is our problem, not yours — we will not use a translation discrepancy against you, and we will correct it once we know. Tell us at hi@gigapop.app if you spot one.

None of this affects the mandatory consumer protections of the law of the country you live in. Those apply in your own language and on their own terms, whatever any version of this page says.

TO BE COMPLETED — check the language requirements of the Member States being targeted. Several national transpositions require pre-contractual consumer information, and in some cases the imprint, to be given in that country's official language. English and Russian may not be enough for every market Gigapop is sold into, particularly where the audience is not only the Russian-speaking diaspora.

13. Changes to this notice

We may update this page. The current version is always at https://gigapop.app/impressum, with the date of the last change at the top. Changes here do not alter rights you already have under a purchase you have already made.

TO BE COMPLETED — two publication requirements that are not satisfied by writing this document. First, create the /impressum route: it does not exist in the codebase yet, so the URL stated just above is currently wrong. Second, this page must be easily recognisable, directly accessible and permanently available — in practice a plainly labelled link in the footer of every page, reachable in one click from anywhere on the site, including the checkout, and not placed behind a login or inside the Terms.

Operator: Ivan Smetanin, Kazakhstan · hi@gigapop.app · Seller and merchant of record: Dodo Payments