The latest from audio collagists Negativland employs three rhetorical strategies to examine the nature of fair use in an age when corporate media outlets are fighting battles on the grassroots, unregulated frontier of the internet. How copyright law affects artists and consumers is a topic on which Negativland is well-qualified to hold forth, having spent their career pushing against the boundaries of fair use to demonstrate how it impedes artistic progress and serves record companies more than the artists it avers to protect.

The first angle is an essay called "Two Relationships to a Cultural Public Domain". Even though it's fairly even-handed, it is essentially polemical in nature, lucidly outlining the cultural developments and opposing points of view that will be more obliquely addressed on the CD. The crux is that the internet has galvanized a drastic ideological polarization as to what constitutes the public domain. The mainstream record industry's position is a throwback to when cultural product was replicated via physical means, which spawned material artifacts of limited supply and calculable monetary value. The opposing position stems from the prominence of digital media, which eliminates the need for costly physical production and places the power of reproduction and dissemination in the hands of anyone with a computer. It states that the internet is public domain, a concept that's anathema to free market capitalism.

You can easily guess which side of the debate Negativland takes up. The essay goes on to outline the history and cultural ramifications of copyright law, from its stifling of "folk art" (since folk art is a communal, viral process more concerned with transmission of heritage than singularity) and collage-based art, to the flaws inherent in the record industry's m.o. that make this potentially beneficial development a threat to its sustainability. The essay closes with a clarion call for an expanded, more sensible definition of fair use, one that protects original works from being plagiarized outright and assures that their creators are compensated for them, while decriminalizing derivative works of satire and reinterpretation, thus no longer impeding what has become our era's most vibrant art Ð the art of appropriation and collage.

As opposed to the didactic nature of the booklet, the audio portion of No Business tends more toward arch satire of the ongoing debate over fair use in digital media, creating a précis of its contradictions and ideological schisms rather than advancing a particular thesis. Some pieces simply intend to display the artistic possibilities inherent in collage, and are more humorous than pedagogical: The title track recasts Ethel Merman's "There's No Business Like Show Business" as a tirade against entertainment-industry iniquity instead of a giddy celebration of it, and "Favorite Things" rearranges the Julie Andrews classic into an appreciation of the grotesque: "Wild brown girls tied up in warm strings/ Wild wild white girls that melt into nose cream/ These are a few of my favorite things." Other pieces delight in the absurd, like "Piece a Pie", a mid-century radio drama chopped up into some sort of hellish recursive time loop, like Groundhog Day in a diner. But the album's centerpiece must be "Downloading", a long and ominously weighted mash-up of anti-filesharing speeches, Disney's The Little Mermaid ("It won't cost much/ Just your voice!"), and other wildly disparate sources, which seems to intend to limn the urgency and complexity of the debate over filesharing more than to stake out a specific ideological position.

The third stage in this three-pronged statement is a whoopee cushion emblazoned with that infamous and iconic "©", and perhaps it's this portion of No Business that states Negativland's stance on the issue most clearly: "THBBBBBBBBBT!"