In cooperation with the British music magazine The Wire, this discussion round shines light on the importance of alternative and unofficial marketing channels for multi-faceted, permeable, experimental and socially relevant music and culture. Is the copy scene today the true youth movement and social avant-garde.
 
Today as in the past, illegal mixes, bootlegs, CD-Rs, cassettes, pirate radios, Youtube, file sharing, peer-to-peer networks, fanzines or full-album blogs circumnavigate the filter of the economy, media, politics and education. They are channels for the distribution of the new ideas, aesthetics and lifestyles emerging on the cultural margins and enable access to materials, texts, audio and video recordings that are no longer available or only with difficulty. Non-commercial Internet pages such as Ubu-Web archive valuable documents of the artistic avant-garde and thus open up the experimentation of cultural niches. By doing so, they provide – often while violating the rights of authors – important contributions to the preservation, the rehabilitation and the further development of experimental art forms, and fight against corporate mono-cultures. The panel discusses the significance and legitimacy of these cultural techniques and debates how the immanently moral conflicts should be classified.