Torrent Reactor ‘Buys’ Itself a Russian Village
Deep in the Siberian tundra, where sub-zero temperatures are the norm and Yaks outnumber computers, the new frontier of internet file-sharing is born.
Torrent Reactor, one of the most popular file-sharing sites on the web, announced recently it has purchased the small Russian town of Gar in exchange for its name. The company reportedly paid $148,000 to rename the town after its website, pledging also to provide the rural village’s residents with broadband service. Most of the money will go to the local school, road repair and the purchase of farming equipment.
According to Torrent Reactor’s website, Gar is a place that was “forgotten by authorities and lives in desolation,” where most of the 214 villagers make a living selling vegetables to other towns. The village itself lies about fifty miles north of Seversk, a major center for plutonium production and uranium enrichment. Seversk was actually used as a secret city by the Soviet Union, not appearing on maps until 1992, and apparently is home to numerous nuclear warheads.
That means the town of Torrent Reactor, which sounds like it could blow up at any second, really could blow up at any second.
But nuclear meltdown isn’t the website’s main worry. File-sharing sites like TR and Pirate Bay are constantly under fire from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), so leaving themselves a legacy might not be such a bad idea. Long after your song-swapping and porn-pilfering services have been halted, you’ll still have a whole geographical location keeping your name alive. And when the town name sounds like the local specialty (in this case, nuclear energy), who says you can’t just go into that business when your file sharing days are over? Torrent Reactor: come for that shady bootleg copy of Tron:Legacy filmed in a Korean movie theater, leave with a healthy dose of weapons-grade plutonium.
So not only is the move a great publicity stunt, but the website now has itself a base of operations way out in the desolate Siberian forests, away from the prying, party-busting eyes of copyright holders and their mighty protectors. Sure, it only has the name for now, but $150,000 holds a lot of sway in a place where the median income is said to be only $42 a year. And with its own city-planning efforts underway, who knows what sort of copy-right infringing, file-sharing oasis they could develop out there?
