ownership and control of the means of communication also significantly aug-
ment the ideological power of this class. Furthermore, the dominant class, with
its superior resources and communications networks, is generally able to organize
its hegemony within the political system. Consequently, government policies re-
garding communications have generally tended to favor property rights over ac-
cess to channels of communication.

The purpose of this book is to extend the main lines of inquiry running through
the political economy of communications into the relatively unexplored area of
intellectual property, particularly copyright. For example, in Chapter 3 the tradi-
tional concern of political economy with ownership and control of the means of
communication is taken one step further to examine ownership and control of
content, through the mechanism of copyright. In that chapter I demonstrate how
copyright serves as an instrument of wealth that can be utilized in the cycle of
capital accumulation to generate more wealth. Copyright can also serve as the
basis for expanding market power. The cases of media capitalists Ted Turner and
Rupert Murdoch show how they used ownership of rights to filmed entertain-
ment to expand their operations into new lines of business. In these cases, the
tendency of copyright to be monopolistic is exacerbated by the oligopolistic
structure of the media marketplace. Ultimately, the effects of concentrated own-
ership of the means of communication and of the messages themselves are the
same: high barriers to entry in the "marketplace of ideas" and a narrow and lim-
ited range of informational and cultural works.

Political economists highlight the logic of capital as the primary determining
factor in shaping the form and structure of the communications system.
Economists of information, in contrast, have sought to explain how the structure
of the information marketplace is determined by the peculiar nature of informa-
tional and cultural commodities. These commodities have the characteristics of
what economists call a "public good," meaning that the product cannot be used
up by any one consumer. This feature also makes it difficult to exclude consumers
from using the good without paying for it. It is also characteristic of informa-
tional and cultural commodities to have relatively low reproduction costs in com-
parison to tangible commodities. Both of these characteristics make markets
dealing in informational and cultural commodities prone to failure. For example,
the videocassette recorder (VCR) opened a new market for the filmed entertain-
ment industry, but it was a market prone to failure from the beginning. Although
it was possible to sell prerecorded videocassettes to consumers, video recording
technology made it easier and cheaper for a person to make multiple copies from
an original cassette at a fraction of the cost.

Providers of informational and cultural goods and services utilize a variety of
mechanisms to deal with the peculiar characteristics of the commodities they sell,

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