Alexey, the owner of TorrentReactor.net, informed TorrentFreak that his company has won its domain dispute against TorrentReactor.com. The complaint was filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on October 26 of last year, with Alex stating that the .com domain is abusing the brand TorrentReactor has built over the years.

New York resident Craig Pratka, the (former) owner of TorrentReactor.com, was not operating a website under the name TorrentReactor but had simply forwarded the domain to the affiliate site allcontentaccess.com. In his complaint, Alex argued that the sole intent of the .com domain was to mislead users of the .net domain.

According to WIPO, Alex stated that Pratka was “intentionally attempting to attract Internet users to his web site for commercial gain, since the web site associated with the disputed domain name is redirected and urges visitors to pay money in order to access its database.”

The WIPO arbitration commission reviewed the case and finally concluded that the domain was indeed registered in bad faith. Alex told TorrentFreak that the domain was transferred to his company yesterday, and that the case is now officially closed.

This successful dispute follows a failed one against the previous owner of the .com domain, Jinsu Kim, who offered to sell it to TorrentReactor.net for $150,000 a few years ago. Alex declined and offered $30,000 instead, to which Kim replied with a new price tag: “The price is $50k and not negotiable.”

In 2008 Alex tried to go for the cheaper option and filed a WIPO dispute. This request was denied because at the time he had not yet registered the TorrentReactor trademark.

In the years that followed the .com domain was sold to Craig Pratka, who owns several torrent site typo domains, and is currently in the process of registering the Pirate Bay trademark. How much Pratka paid for the .com domain is unknown, but based on the previous quotes it can’t have been cheap.

Thankfully there are trademark and copyright laws to stop such abusive behavior.

Source: TorrentReactor.net Wins Trademark Infringing .Com Domain

The village, founded in 1958 by a religious group connected to the Russian Orthodox Church, was reportedly bought for 4.5 million rubles ($148,000 or 115,000 euros). TorrentReactor said that the money would be used to re-equip the local school, repair roads and purchase agricultural equipment. Not least the money would bring the village into the Internet age through the introduction of broadband, a wonderful prospect for a place said to have only three computers and a single dial up connection.

But those who know TorrentReactor will also be familiar with their sense of humor and earlier pranks. This news concerning the village was quite rightly taken with a grain of salt – or two.

After being reported in dozens of Russian news outlets, the claim was investigated by a correspondent at local news outlet Media FM in Tomsk who managed to speak with Tatyana Tolkachev from the Asinovski district where Gar is located.

As it turns out, TorrentReactor’s assessment that the village had 214 residents was a little off the mark – it actually has 380. Equally the claim that there are only 3 computers in the area was an underestimate, there are more, and many have Internet access.

Furthermore, the notion that the villagers make a living from selling home-grown vegetables in a nearby town possibly painted an overly rustic image of a place which actually has its own fire department, a club, a few shops, a post office and a school which houses 50 students.

And, according to administrator Marina Platov, the revelation that her village has been sold and renamed is a surprise to her, but nevertheless, not an unwelcome one.

Should an offer be received, Platov said the villagers would not be against it. The roads in and around Gar are very poorly maintained and that 4.5 million rubles would be very helpful, she explained.

The TorrentReactor crew, who now feel obligated to help the town out in some shape or form, informed us that renaming the town is not a viable option. “We can’t rename the village, it’s a long story,” founder Alex told TorrentFreak this morning in response.

Indeed, according to another report, renaming villages isn’t easy. Although a choice can be made by the villagers, the final decision lies with the President of Russia.

So, now that the poor and needy villagers of Gar have become excited at the prospect of some significant investment from a torrent site, what are the TorrentReactor people going to do to stop them becoming disappointed?

“We can do other things,” promises Alex.

To find out what exactly, we have to wait until tomorrow.

Source: Despite Confusion, Village Still Wants Torrent Site Investment

Within a few weeks the campaign raised some $20,000 from potential citizens, but this wasn’t enough. Sealand turned out not to be an option as it was prized at 750 million euros, which equals to nearly one billion US dollars. Other alternatives were considered but most islands lacked a proper Internet connection.

Now, three years later the Russian based torrent site Torrentreactor has reportedly bought some land of their own, without any help or funding from the outside. TorrentReactor founder Alex informed TorrentFreak about the peculiar move which puts the torrent site on the map in rural Russia.

The town of Gar, founded in 1958 by a religious group connected to the Russian Orthodox Church, was bought for 4.5 million rubles ($148,000 or 115,000Eur). Gar is located in the center of Russia and has only 214 inhabitants who make a living from selling home-grown vegetables in a nearby town.

With the financial injection from TorrentReactor the people of Gar (now the people of TorrentReactor) will be able to get connected to the Internet. Right now, there are only three computers available in the entire town, and just one is connected to the Internet via a dial-up connection.

“Most of it will be split among villagers and the rest will be used to re-equip the local school, repair roads, purchase agricultural equipment and machinery. Also torrentreactor.net company decided to pay for broadband Internet connection in the settlement which will result in about 900,000 rubles ($30,000) because there are no networks nearby,” TorrentReactor says.

Although some might see it as a vanity buy, or an overly expensive marketing campaign, the TorrentReactor team stresses that the humanitarian motive came first.

“We realize it’s just a drop in the ocean comparing to the amount of money needed to help thousands of other villages. But we at least do something to support complete strangers. We are proud that we are able to do so and hope we will be proud of this in the future,” the TorrentReactor team said.

According to TorrentReactor the local authorities were skeptical about the deal at first, but they went ahead with it after the right price was negotiated. TorrentFreak contacted the Tomsk authorities for a comment on the unusual deal, but thus far they are yet to respond.

Because we were unable to verify the deal from both ends, we have to inform our readers that TorrentReactor is known to carry out pranks and ludicrous actions. Earlier this year their partner site shipped condoms to the RIAA, MPAA and various other anti-piracy outfits, informing them that their bullying tactics are not appreciated.

Although the condom action was verified and legit, TorrentReactor’s latest announcement has not yet been officially confirmed by Russian authorities. TorrentFreak readers who live in the area or have more information are encouraged to get in touch with us to provide additional details.

Update: Despite confusion, village still wants torrent site investment.

Source: TorrentReactor Buys and Renames Russian Town

Websense reports that TorrentReactor has been injected with an IFrame that connects to a malicious site full of exploits. The exploits affects various applications including Internet Explorer and Adobe’s Shockwave and Acrobat Reader.

Once the user is successfully exploited a Trojan Downloader with an extremely low anti-virus detection rate will download and install a rootkit on the user’s system, after which more evil is bound to happen.

TorrentReactor’s founder Alex told TorrentFreak that they are looking into the matter and hope to fix the vulnerability as soon as possible. Alex further told us that he has no clue who’s behind the attack.

This is not the first time that TorrentReactor has suffered from an IFrame injection as The Register points out. Last year it dealt with a similar security breach.

Needless to say, TorrentReactor users may want to avoid the site for the time being if they’d rather not have a rootkit on their system.

Update: Alex told TorrentFreak that the problem has been addressed. “It was sql injection which was fixed the same day. Now we do everything to prevent it in the future. We’re very sorry.”

Source: TorrentReactor Users Suffer Rootkit Attack

It’s interesting how BitTorrent Inc’s focus has shifted to include DRM and be restricted to only legal content. The initial goal of BitTorrent.com was to index all the various movies, music, TV shows and other files available over BitTorrent. Wired News reported in 2005 on the upcoming launch of the site that was going to be “an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download.”

We recently wrote about how BitTorrent.com was helping game developers distribute demos. In that article we profiled the strategy game Disciples II: Dark Prophecy. It was only a demo. But if you type “Disciples” into the search box on BitTorrent.com, you’ll find both the demo and a pirated version of the full game. Or try searching for “Prison Break” and see what you find. Each one of the 29 results you get is a copyrighted file. How exactly do these “filters” work?

How does BitTorrent.com get all this illegal content? It obviously doesn’t have an active uploading community like The Pirate Bay or Torrentspy. Instead, it indexes other torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, Meganova, Torrent Portal and TorrentReactor.

So, our question is, How is BitTorrent.com different from any other so-called illegal torrent site that indexes copyrighted content? Btmon.com does exactly the same thing! Sure, BitTorrent.com’s frontpage is full of game demos, legal music downloads and movie trailers, but one little search query away is just about every popular movie, TV show, music album and computer game.

In our minds, and according to US law, what BitTorrent.com is doing is not illegal. The DMCA clearly states that websites are only required to take down files if the copyright holder or a representative files a complaint. But why does the MPAA sue sites like Isohunt and Torrentspy (who also respect the DCMA), while they’re in bed with BitTorrent?

Dan Glickman (MPAA) and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)

Source: BitTorrent Inc: We Don’t Index Illegal Torrents

John from Searching Unlimited LTD, one of the masterminds behind the project told TorrentFreak that he is happy that he was able to bring these brilliant people together and recruit some of the web’s most gifted engineers.

Although the sites are sold to Searching Unlimited LTD, the site owners stay in charge of daily operation.

John Gotts explained:

All BitTorrent admins who sell their site will own a part of Searching Unlimited LTD, the parent company. However, they all will continue to own and operate the site they sell us. Additionally they will get pay and advertising revenue share of both their old company and any new projects they help create or support.

Gotts added that the great thing about this initiative is the brain trust that they are creating at Searching. “It’s a family of companies, and the huge amount of traffic we generate, together with the genius people who are involved, make it a very powerful family”.

BitTorrent sites make up for a significant portion of the total Web traffic. Teaming up all these high traffic BitTorrent sites (combined with their other projects) will instantly make them a big and powerful player on the online advertising market.

Stay tuned!

Source: BitTorrent sites sell up