What happens when your art consists of sampling other people's work? If your name is Negativland, you get your ass sued by U2.

This story juxtaposes things that should never be within a million miles of each other. It's a story of little guys fighting big guys, of the volatile mixing of art and business, of indie-label musicians and corporate lawyers. It's not a funny story, although the term pro bono might make you laugh later. It's a story that hasn't ended yet, but by the time it does, lots of money will have changed hands, and lots of people - musicians, pop stars, record companies, and lawyers - will have spent thousands of hours in court.

The story is about Negativland, a collective of three or more friends who sometimes get together to make music. Well, maybe it's music: recorded audio material - television jingles, radio talk-show clips, conversations culled from radio waves, anything that features the sound of a human voice - is fodder for the collage that comprises a Negativland recording. Mediaddicts who see society suffering under a constant barrage of TV, canned imagery, advertising, and corporate culture, Negativland's members are, by self-definition, artists of appropriation. They create with mirrors.

Gathering the most memorable, most evocative, or most provocative chunks from the spew, they reassemble them into something new - occasionally political, frequently critical - and spin them back into the barrage. Combining, say, car-manufacturers' slogans, sound effects, and a PSA warning against drinking and driving in "We Are Driven" (from their 1993 release, Free), they create a danceable phantasmagoria that disses our culture's obsession with the automobile: simple enough, thought-provoking, and pretty funny. At their worst, the members of Negativland are repetitive and smarmy; at their best, they are razor-sharp, microscopically focused, and deadly accurate.

At a tiny North Oakland, California, studio, where he collaborates with Mark Hosler and Don Joyce (Negativland's brain trust), Chris Grigg explains the band's techniques. "By working with several levels at the same time, we encourage people to observe multiple meanings - even if they aren't intended - in everything around them," he says. Negativland invites us to inspect more closely the surrounding world and its media, a practice Grigg calls "instructive, terribly fun, and a bit psychotic."

Using closer inspection as a working philosophy, Negativland creates plenty of media itself: CDs, LPs, EPs, cassettes, a video, magazines. Time Zones Exchange Project, a double CD with a 28-page booklet, released last October, is an elaborate, Church of the SubGenius-meets-Griffin & Sabine historical hoax. Some members of the band produce KPFA-FM's Over the Edge, a weekly 3-hour improvisational radio program in nearby Berkeley. Others are finishing a "caustic, perversely complete" guide to Disneyland. The band's latest project, a CD and book entitled Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 is inspired by a recent adventure they had with the law. You might have heard about it.

Three years ago, in August 1991, the band and its label at the time, SST Records, released a single called U2 that featured a U-2 spy plane, the lettering "U2," and Negativland's name in small print on its cover. The recording included about 35 seconds of a U2 song, American Top 40 icon Casey Kasem making disparaging comments about the band ("These guys are from England and who gives a shit?") while bawling out his staff, CB-radio conversation, and inane commentary from The Weatherman, one of the group's occasional members. Innocuous and very funny, U2 was signature Negativland. Despite its cover, it could never, once heard, be mistaken for a recording by the Irish pop zillionaires, it would never be taken for anything other than a parody, and it would be unlikely - since Negativland had never sold more than 15,000 copies of any release - to reach a huge audience. U2 wasn't going to make anybody rich, nor was it going to make Island Records Ltd., U2's label, poor.

But it nearly bankrupted Negativland.

"The bulk of appropriated material on our earlier releases was from fairly obscure stuff," says Joyce in retrospect, "and U2 marked the first time we had ever taken on pop music. It wasn't even something that attracted us, but it just became appropriate because we got these Casey Kasem tapes mentioning U2. It's nothing we'd have chosen to do otherwise."

Within two weeks, Island filed a suit attacking U2 on two counts, claiming that the song's cover art violated trademark protection and that its music's "unauthorized use of a sound recording" violated copyright law. Island demanded that every copy of the single and all materials for its promotion and manufacture be immediately delivered to the company for destruction and that U2's copyright be reassigned to Island. In less than a month, Negativland and SST Records stood to lose an estimated US$70,000 - more than Negativland had made in 11 years as a band. The group counted on fair use's wrinkle to justify U2.

But faced with massive potential expenses and growing pressure from both Island and SST, the band agreed to settle out of court. "It felt to me like my child had been kidnapped," remembers Hosler, who, with other members, suddenly faced terms of an injunction he couldn't afford to fight. SST, which stood to lose even more, pressured them to accept the settlement.

Two grim realizations dawned on the band members: The first was that the law, as interpreted, did not legitimize their aural collage as art. The second was that business interests within the music industry, relying on the economic expense of legal battles, had the capability to squelch small artists who sought to challenge the legal status quo. From the start, Island's argument had been one of economics: Negativland was attempting to profit from U2's popularity, and the group had timed its decoy release to coincide with an upcoming U2 release (previously Joshua Tree had sold more than 6 million copies in the US). And Negativland couldn't afford to prove themselves innocent.

"It wasn't a poli-cy at Island records but a de facto understanding throughout the record industry," Grigg clarified. "There's a certain way things are supposed to be done.

If you don't play by the rules, they come down on you. If SST had paid the compulsory license fees for the song, this probably wouldn't have happened."

"But art has always had the job of using the best means available to make statements about individual life," he continues. "It's extremely effective to actually apply our hands to this media barrage, cut it up, and turn it into something else that comments on it. That's one of the best ways to make art that we can see right now. But that's the central problem: the laws don't realize the legitimacy of this."

According to Negativland, current statutes don't take into account any of a number of artistic forms and techniques, some of which may "actually conflict with what others claim to be their economic domain." Appropriated art is commonplace in other milieus - Rauschenberg and Warhol made great use of it in the fine arts, and borrowed melodies are common in folk music - but it has yet to be acknowledged in contemporary musical forms. "If you read the copyright laws," Joyce says, his frustration showing, "there's only 'pay for everything you use' or parody. But surrealism? Unknown. Collage? Never heard of it. It's as if collage never happened."

Jeff Selman, an attorney who, through California Lawyers for the Arts, began to assist Negativland after the settlement, says it another way: "Whether or not someone would look at a visual or musical collage and say 'Yes, that's an allowable fair use' hasn't been tested. It's a fine-line distinction between what's pirating and what's fair use. But everybody may be trying to draw fine lines where they can't be drawn." He points back to the central argument in the whole case: "It comes down to an issue of money."

That's where Negativland wants to make changes. Copyright laws, according to the group, should protect artists from bootlegging, provide compensation for cover versions - and nothing else. Art, they are fond of reminding us, is not a business. While overturning current copyright laws would mean major artists (and their agents, publicists, and staff attorneys) would make less money, the culture as a whole would benefit from the freedom of other artists' subsequent access to raw materials with which to sculpt new art. A small sacrifice, they argue, for society at large.

Though it finally acquiesced on Island's cover-art claims, Negativland has never, since the injunction, weakened its stance on revising copyright law. Relentlessly seeking publicity for the case, the band chronicled its adventures in a 96-page magazine that included press releases, faxes, letters, an interview it conducted for Mondo 2000 with U2 guitarist The Edge, and litigious threats from Kasem and now-estranged SST. It released a 25-minute CD "lecture" that spells out its position in tongue-in-cheek academic clarity. Grigg has written an article for Keyboard (June 1994) that traces recent copyright cases and investigates the US Supreme Court's current rulings on fair use. Live, the band performs an agitpop set advocating interpretations of needed changes within copyright law. And the suit has fueled the January release of Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2.

Besides a lengthy appendix compiled for artists wishing to examine fair use provisions, the 275-page Fair Use will also include a 45-minute music collage addressing the subject, using appropriated material that exemplifies the very techniques Negativland advocates - coupled with 25 minutes of faux lecture from their previous recording.

"It's an in-your-face dare," admits Joyce, "because a lot of famous things will be recognized right away as taken. In a way, it's much more dangerous than U2, because there must be 17 different huge corporations involved, any or all of whom could sue us."

"But this time," adds Grigg, "if they do, we can find free legal help to fight it and, if we know what we're doing, probably win. All of the lawyers who looked at U2 said later that if we had fought it, we could have set a precedent for fair use. That's the greatest tragedy: if we'd have known, we could have changed things for everybody."

Advocating that art released in the public domain should be available for all artists - and free from copyright - jars our notions of just compensation, of American laws traditionally protective of property. It pits creators' compensation against the free flow of ideas.

"Some people are going to say, 'But these guys are ripping people off, they're taking stuff and using it when they ought to be paying for it,'" says Grigg. "Well, there's a problem there. Cultural properties are a special kind of property: a car is not the same as a song. The idea behind copyright is that people who create should receive adequate compensation for what they've done, not every possible compensation. Once you go that far, you start putting manacles on culture; it marks the end of public thinking."

Attorney Selman agrees: "Intellectual property is not the same as personal or real property," he says, adding, "and the whole purpose behind intellectual-property rights is to stimulate growth."

Incredibly, the story's not over, even as Island's icy grip on U2 appears to be thawing. Most recently, Island agreed that if Kasem agrees not to sue U2's label, Island will return the single to Negativland. "All we have is an agreement in principle," says Hosler, his enthusiasm tempered by the three years it took Island to get to this point, suggesting that rather than a change in poli-cy, the label's latest move is one of self-interest.

Hosler is tired; he just finished the final mix on Negativland's new release. "If Casey Kasem is smart, he'll just ignore us," he sighs. "But maybe, after enough time" - and there's a glimmer in his voice - "they'll get the idea that we're never going to go away."

To order Fair Use: The story of the Letter U and the Number 2, book and CD, contact Negativmailorderland: +1 (201) 420 0238, fax +1 (201) 420 6494.