ABSTRACT
This chapter begins to lay out the theoretical framework that guides the "Who owns the message?" inquiry into the relationships among filmed entertainment, new communications technology, and intellectual property rights. The framework combines radical political economy with information economics, Marxist and radical theories of the capitalist state, and critical legal studies. Radical political-economic communications theory and research can be organized into three fundamental categories: the economic structure of communications industries; the effects of the logic of capital on the production, distribution, and consumption of culture and information; and the contradictions and forms of resistance within capitalist communications systems. The chapter contributes primarily to research in the first category, the analysis of the structure of the communications industry. It focuses on the structure of the filmed entertainment industry and on who owns and controls the communications industry and its core asset, intellectual property.
