Russian Village Purchased by TorrentReactor File Sharing Website

Online file sharing hub, TorrentReactor, recently bought a small village in Russia and renamed it after themselves.
Russian Village Purchased by TorrentReactor File Sharing Website
A screen shot of TorrentReactor's home page. (TorrentReactor.net)
Joshua Philipp
8/9/2010
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/torrent.jpg" alt="A screen shot of TorrentReactor's home page.  (TorrentReactor.net)" title="A screen shot of TorrentReactor's home page.  (TorrentReactor.net)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1816351"/></a>
A screen shot of TorrentReactor's home page.  (TorrentReactor.net)
Online file sharing hub, TorrentReactor, recently bought a small village in the center of Russia, which was then renamed after the website. The farming village of Gar was purchased for the equivalent of $148,000 and now goes by the Russian name of the site, TorrentReactor, according to the website.

There are currently only three computers in the village of 214, and only one of them is connected to the Internet. According to torrentreactor.net, the purchase of the village met with some controversy at first with Tomsk region authorities, “But due to a considerable donation in favor of village citizens that accompanies the deal it was resolved pretty fast.”

The town was among thousands considered by TorrentReactor that are situated near nuclear reactors. Gar is close to Russia’s Seversk nuclear reactor.

“The list was numbered and a random number was picked by a generator,” according to TorrentReactor. “The number 377 was a lucky one for Gar village. We think it was a good choice since Gar citizens are very kind and generous people.”

The village of Gar was founded in 1958 by a religious group from the Russian Orthodox Church, which denied 1960s reforms and stuck by old traditions. “As Russia was a part of The Soviet Union at that time all religions were persecuted. Many people had to keep it underground,” according to TorrentReactor, adding that with the nuclear reactor just 124 miles away “many political prisoners had to work there.”

Currently, the main income for the recently renamed village comes through selling vegetables to nearby towns. There are no businesses, and the average income for villagers comes out to $48 a year.

File sharing sites, also called P2P (peer-to-peer), or torrent sites, often contain a searchable list of files which can be downloaded and then transferred to an application where users can grab virtually any movie, game, or piece of software on the Web.

Such websites are controversial due to the large amount of pirated software and videos which they often make available for download.

This isn’t the first time a torrent site has attempted such a purchase. In 2007, file sharing website, The Pirate Bay, launched its “Buy Sealand” campaign in an attempt to purchase the micronation of Sealand, according to file sharing news source TorrentFreak.

The Principality of Sealand is a gun platform which was abandoned after World War II in international waters, six miles off the coast of England. It was established as a micronation in 1967.

The Pirate Bay planned to bring high-speed Internet and no copyright laws to Sealand. The plan failed, however, and they only raised $20,000, which was far from enough to make the purchase.
Joshua Philipp is senior investigative reporter and host of “Crossroads” at The Epoch Times. As an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, his works include "The Real Story of January 6" (2022), "The Final War: The 100 Year Plot to Defeat America" (2022), and "Tracking Down the Origin of Wuhan Coronavirus" (2020).
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