Abstract
At the digital poetry conference in 2002 at the University of Iowa, Kenneth Goldsmith presented the aforementioned paper regarding the vision and history of UBUWeb to the present date. He also talked about the process and adventure these avant-garde files and work proceed once they have been digitized, stripped bare, and copied or reworked in new fashions. He even mentions the avant-garde’s fortunate journey into popular culture with rock band Sonic Youth’s 1999 release Goodbye to the Twentieth Century.  Goldsmith begins his talk sharing his favorite email from Meredith who wrote: : “i really enjoyed your site. it made me think about different cultures other than the ones i experience daily living in a small Texas town”. Goldsmith then went to ruminate on the rich fulfillment he received by noting that Meredith’s note,

succinctly summed up everything that I had wished to achieve with UbuWeb: that of a distribution point for out of print, hard-to-find, small run, obscure materials, available at no cost from any point on the globe. Although the technologies of the web are continually developing in terms of sophistication, UbuWeb embraces the distributive possibilities inherent in the web's original technologies: call it radical forms of distribution.

This radical form of distribution is UBU web’s calling card. UbUWeb was launched in November of 1996, and quickly has become a “clearing house of the avant-garde art on the web”. UBUWeb is comprised of the most comprehensive archive of sound and concrete poetry on the web, but also offers an extensive amount of avant-garde film, and recordings from a plethora of avant-garde artists from Samuel Beckett to Marcel Duchamp. It’s humble beginnings began with Kenneth’s own impressive collection of sound and concrete poetry, and from day one he has desired to stay committed to making these resources “available and free” to all. UBUWeb is in existence to keep the avant-garde contemporary with culture with its accessibility on the web.

Relevance
I first came across UBUWeb about two years ago, and since I have had to limit my time spent on the site if I desire to be any kind of productive student/ human being outside of my poetic and artistic interests. It is easy to become lost, like a toddler in Toys ‘R’ US, on UBUWeb. Its clean, and manageable interface gets deeper and deeper in the plethora of seemingly endless works. It is true that many of the works posted on UBUWeb cannot be found in your local library (even University library), and its accessibility is something to fight for and cherish. The ability to preserve and offer such a vast and free library is what excites me most about the web. This “radical form of distribution” is not only fascinating to me, but something I have come to believe is necessary for the education and preservation of culture. Many of the works found on the site are frozen due to the CTEA (Copyright Term Extension Act), meaning they are not scheduled to enter the public domain at the earliest until 2019. Kenneth’s defiance in his conduct of posting the content and eschewing the normal means of being granted permission for most works, is of interest to my research of copyright law, and how UBUWeb is an example of artistic culture  that can be preserved for the good of the general public without harmful exploitation to the copyright holder. The “utopoian-cyber landscape” of UbuWeb is of particular interest, because I argue it is a beacon of the good that comes from media archiving and any laws that could hinder or impede upon this construction are detrimental to the public good.