Many bands chase hit records, but, as Negativland member Mark Hosler once put it, his group is famous for a different reason: Call it a hit lawsuit. The improbably long-lived culture-jamming collective is still best known for incurring the wrath of Island Records in 1991 for its mix single that fused a U2 chart-topper with vitriolic rants by Top-40 announcer Casey Kasem. The dustup sealed the gadfly group’s identity as poster boys for fair use by artists and satirists.

Thousands of YouTube mashups later, the audio collages of Negativland — “Our Favorite Things” — feel like a throwback to a pre-Internet generation of copyright-fighters. A new compilation of videos for these songs called “Our Favorite Things,” created by 17 experimental filmmakers from all over the world and released on DVD today by Other Cinema, distributes nose-tweaks to Disney, Pepsi, and U2, and jabs at the all-encompassing reach of corporate culture and the ad industry. Covering the group’s releases from the past 25 years (up to 2005’s “No Business”), the collection is, like much of the collective’s work, partly a self-referential statement about continued creative prerogatives and freedoms.

Negativland, by its own admission, is not something you blithely play while doing the dishes. The group, which released its first album in 1980, descends from do-it-yourself, tape-edit culture and yuppie prankster activism. Its “songs” typically rework vocal samples from radio, archival reels, and other sources with a satirical twist, and they can be repetitive and insistent (like many pop songs). Delivering modest, often blunt critical payloads, they sometimes simply flaunt the self-evident idiocy and conformist iconography of their sources.

But that’s fine if you’re sampling Mr. Kasem cursing a blue streak about a dearly departed little dog named Snuggles. The lawsuit-fodder “U2: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” overlays the famous U2 melody on a stolen recording of Mr. Kasem ranting at engineers about transitions between songs and dedications. He dismisses the U2 song he struggles to introduce: “Who gives a s—?” It’s a classic bit of pulling the mask off the happy-fun pop universe, and is part of the bootleg canon even with the Internet now flooded with such unguarded moments. For “U2” and other songs on the compilation, the accompanying visuals are a literal-minded afterthought — think concert footage, Mr. Kasem’s head, a cute dog, computer-graphic noodling — but not always. “Gimme the Mermaid” deftly puts a music lawyer’s threatening phone messages into the animated mouth of the Little Mermaid (her perfectly rendered image courtesy of a Disney employee). And “Guns” provides an example of Negativland’s longer-form, Cold War-conformity collage, amassing a bounty of ’50s archival footage that peaks with two youngsters receiving two rifles through their television set.

Again, the videos are more Frank Zappa than Bruce Conner, but nothing should detract from Negativland’s stamina and inspiration to an earlier, woollier age. This was the band that in 1988 convinced several local TV outlets to run an unsubstantiated story attributing a disturbed killer’s mass murders to their single “Christianity Is Stupid.” (It is set here to a post-“Passion of the Christ” montage of Jesus epics; one of the news broadcasts is also included.) And after the U2 imbroglio, the group published a respected full accounting of the ordeal, including transcripts and communications, in the form of the 1995 book “Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2.”

All of which makes one wish that “Our Favorite Things” gave more context and commentary (especially for a band whose output is not just art, but actions). It would be interesting to mention, for instance, that the Marky Mark sample in “Gimme the Mermaid” is now ironic because Mr. Wahlberg, like others, would later sample Negativland without permission. Not every reference is as obvious as the cover art’s doll-strewn parody of “The Sound of Music.” (The relevant video, “Favorite Things,” dices individual words from the musical’s twee standard into something horrific: “Lashes that sting on colored girls / tied up with blue satin sashes…”)

Negativland may embrace didacticism with videos like “Why Is This Commercial?,” which features the memorable refrain: “Hi, I’m me, I’m using this, to sell you this,” and the DVD’s accompanying CD of a cappella renditions epitomizes a concept taken too far. But the release falls in line with Other Cinema’s laudable alternative slate, which includes the mind-blowing found-footage pastiche “Tribulation 99” as well as a documentary featuring Negativland, “Sonic Outlaws.” And Negativland’s message — that the output of our culture needs to be free for us to take apart and work over — remains trenchant now more than ever.