Negativland is at it again.

The culture-jamming band which brought you a deconstruction of U2's mega-hit "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and subsequently entered in a protracted legal battle over it, has a new target of their musical, a-hem, affection -- Pepsi.

Having put the U2 fiasco behind them, the group finally set to work on their latest mind-fuck project, which they've been toiling at for almost three years, something they're calling Dispepsi. Speaking from Negativland's California media bunker, group member Mark Hosler playfully described the effort as "an entire record about our favorite soft drink."

The album, which Hosler hopes will be out by the end of July, will again be put out by the band, simply because, Hosler said, "we wouldn't want to work with any record label because we despise the music industry. Besides, there's nobody out there that would work with us anyway."

And it's little wonder. When the members of Negativland came up with what they thought was a clever poke at the high-and-mighty band U2, little did they know that it would drag them down into a five-year spiral of threats, lawsuits and legal hassles about what constitutes "fair use" and the limits of free speech.

The song that took a healthy poke at the Irish quartet's Joshua Tree hit appeared on the band's U2 EP (1991) complete with verbal asides and a profanity-laced tirade from (previously) squeaky clean Top-40 host Casey Kasem. Using the lyrics from the hit overlaid with nasal commentary from Negativland (such as "I've lost it and I just can't seem to find it/ What it is I'm looking for/ Maybe I should just be shot point blank/ Right in the stamper") and vicious outtakes from Kasem, including "these guys are from England and who gives a shit? A bunch of names that don't mean diddly-shit," Negativland took the then-mightiest band on the planet down a notch, and it cost them.

The ensuing fair usage battle became the organizing principle not just for a movie called Sonic Outlaws, which featured profiles of a host of culture jamming groups, but also Negativland's own book, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, which gave readers an update of the whole U2/Kasem quagmire. But it also caused them years of grief courtesy of Bono and company as well as Kasem and their former label, SST.

This time, however, Hosler said the band is taking precautions. The new effort, which is basically a collage of Pepsi commercials that deals with multi-national corporations "in a really fun way," finds the group conferring with several attorneys (who have graciously offered pro bono advice to the cash-strapped collective) on fair use and copyright laws.

Attorney David Nimmer, author of Nimmer on Copyright, and an expert in the field of copyright law, is not among them, but used his expertise to explain what Negativland might be up against this time around. He said that, contrary to popular myth, there is no "three second" rule on sampling music, but if an artist takes "only snippets" of samples from a pre-existing work, it may not infringe the copyright. To constitute copyright infringement, a sampling must feature a substantial amount of material. "It's always an ad hoc, case-by-case evaluation of quantity and quality," he added.

Despite their difficulties expressing their non-mainstream, anti-consumer culture views the last time around, Hosler said he hopes people see the Dispepsi project not as an object lesson, but as a critique that tells people what Negativland think about the pervasiveness of certain icons in modern culture. "We're not Noam Chomsky," Hosler said. Besides, "they (Pepsi) should love it. When all is said and done, at end of the record, all you remember is Pepsi."

Nimmer said there have been a number of cases litigated on the usage of commercials in music, such as a Schlitz beer ad and a parody of the Energizer bunny television ads (themselves a parody of an older ad).

In the case of the Negativland album (which he hasn't heard), Nimmer suggested the "Rick Dees" method of judgment, referring to a case in which radio DJ Rick Dees did a parody of the song "When Johnny Gets Blue," called "When Sammy Sniffs Glue." The issue was whether a parody of an entire song is copyright protected. "It's the kind of thing 'Weird' Al does all the time," Nimmer said, "He always gets permission from the original artist. The question is, 'are you making fun of a copyrighted work or using it to make fun of something else.' If it's the latter, it's fair use; if the former, it's not."

For his part, Hosler can foresee a scenario in which people would speculate that Pepsi actually hired Negativland to get the "ironic, anti-corporate" dollar coming in. "I know nobody will believe me, but we don't want to get sued, it's a living nightmare," said Hosler. "But just because we got sued doesn't mean we won't deal with issues in our work that we want to deal with."

After Dispepsi (if there is an after), Hosler said the band is finishing up an instrumental record, another Over the Edge compilation of their weekly radio show on KPFA (94.1 FM) in the Bay Area and possibly a book titled Negativland's Guide to Disneyland, a travel guide to the park that will "enrich your experience."