The Piracy Effect (online edition) – edited by Roberto Braga e Giovanni Caruso – www.cinergie.it 1 Sharing All’Italiana. The Reproduction and Distribution of the giallo on Torrent File-Sharing Websites Oliver Carter Introduction Online file-sharing communities became easily accessible locations for fans to collectively share, access and archive digital files converted from old VHS video releases or recorded television broadcasts. This chapter focuses on how the giallo, a particular form of Italian cult cinema, is shared, reapproriated and recirculated on an invite only file-sharing community that I refer to as CineTorrent. Drawing on a virtual ethnography of this community and engagement with its members, I consider how rules and regulations instigated by the moderators of the site both encourage and reward member creativity. This has led to the generation of a comprehensive archive of cult film, in which Italian cult cinema plays a significant role. I argue that fans are responding to the current limitations of commercially releasing gialli on DVD by taking it upon themselves to make them available and in doing this they create what I refer to as an amateur archive of gialli. CineTorrent was established in 2007. Unlike the vast number of BitTorrent communities available on the World Wide Web it is has a particular niche, specialising in the sharing of cult film. Having a membership capped at 20,000, CineTorrent is a sought after file-sharing site that offers the cult film fan access to a catalogue of cult film, many of which are commercially unavailable on a digital medium. Discourses on file-sharing that circulate in the media would have us believe that file- sharing communities are sites of lawlessness. However, the irony is that site such as CineTorrent are bound in their own strict laws, policies and regulations. Like a typical business organisation, CineTorrent operates a typical top-down institutional hierarchy in order to ensure that the website has structure and a mission of intent. The moderators have introduced a number of rules that dictate what can and cannot be shared, ensuring that anything that is regarded as being mainstream is excluded from being shared. These rules are aggressively enforced. This approach has a dual purpose. Firstly, it creates a set of boundaries that guide user collaboration, secondly, as most of the material shared is commercially unavailable and cult, they reduce the possibilities of prosecution and legal activity that they would attract from sharing ‘popular’ cinema. I wish to focus on one of the policies that the site adopts to encourage users to construct exhaustive archives of obscure cinema, which are referred to as ‘Projects’ CineTorrent and the Constructing of an Amateur Archive In his auto-ethnography of horror fandom, Mark Kermode 1 believes that the watchword of the cult film fan is "completist". The completist nature of the cult film fan can be further evidenced on CineTorrent. One of the outcomes of CineTorrent’s rules and regulations is that they guide member activity in a particular direction. By creating a system that ensures specific content is being regularly uploaded to the site, I suggest that it leads to the creation of an archive of cult film, or as I refer to it, an ‘amateur archive’. To further clarify, by referring to it as an amateur archive it highlights the crowd-sourced nature of the collection and how the boundaries of the archive are set 1 M. Kermode, I Was a Teenage Horror Fan: or, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linda Blair”, in M. Barker, J. Petley (edited by), Ill Effects: The media/violence debate, Routledge, London 2001, pp. 126-134.